From Publishers Weekly
One imagines many readers are still absorbing The Writer and the World, Naipaul's magisterial collection of deeply opinionated global political reports and cultural meditations that was released last August, covering the last four decades of the Nobel laureate's nonfiction work. The paperback of Writer pubs a month before this book, which collects Naipaul's literary prose, a mixed bag including everything from reminiscences of his laconic childhood approach toward writing to his 1983 foreword to his celebrated 1961 novel, A House for Mr. Biswas. Indeed, the most substantial piece here, "Prologue to an Autobiography," is also 20 years old and also previously published, as are the other 10 entries here. All touch on Naipaul's Trinidadian upbringing and coming-of-age or his adult writing life in one way or another; together, they form a literary autobiography that has its apotheosis in the most recent piece, Naipaul's 2001 Nobel lecture, "Two Worlds," which notes, "When I began I had no idea of the way ahead. I wished only to do a book." He has done many; this book is for readers interested in their sources.
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From Booklist
"I have trusted to intuition," Naipaul confides in "Two Worlds," his elegant and poignant 2001 Nobel Prize lecture, one jewel among many in this engrossing collection of four decades' worth of literary and autobiographical essays, a companion volume to
The Writer and the World [BKL My 1 02]. Naipaul has also obeyed his unceasing need to understand life as lived outside the confines of the immigrant Indian community in the village of Chaguanas, Trinidad, in which he grew up. His sharp reminiscences reveal the source of his unflinching, often controversial analyses of cultural assumptions, the politics of prejudice, and the unreliability of history as he considers the confounding disconnection between his early desire to be a writer and his inability to lose himself in books because what he read had so little to do with his life. In writing about his painful struggle to find his writing voice, Oxford-educated Naipaul considers the legacy of imperialism and relates the incredibly moving story of his father, a self-taught writer. Naipaul's vigorous interpretations of Conrad, Dickens, and R. K. Narayan, and candid self-disclosure cogently explicate the mysterious call to write and celebrate the radiance literature brings to lives otherwise relegated to the shadows.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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