A Way in the World: A Novel (Vintage International) - Softcover

Naipaul, V S

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679761667 ISBN 13: 9780679761662

Publisher: Vintage, 1995

Synopsis

"Most of Us Know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings." So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum - that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp - which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction, the first in seven years by one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in The Enigma of Arrival, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention. It is the story of a writer's lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance - language, character, family history - and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: "things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing." What he writes - and what his release of memory enables us to see - is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh's final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda's disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator's own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates toEngland, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling. With Proustian reflective power, with infinite warmth and humour, and with an acute intelligence, Naipaul has created a monumental tale of identity recovered and remade from undated time an

About this title

Review:

"There is not a page that is not stamped with Naipaul's compelling charm and peculiar authority...he retains, somehow or other, a sense of wonder at the varieties of human experience and the infinite vagaries of human behaviour" (Scotsman)

"One of literature's senior players, a writer whose work - nimble in defence, formidable in attack - is impossible to dismiss... it is the seriousness and delicacy of his concerns that capture and keep our attention. Wherever he has been - which is almost everywhere - he has stalked the anxieties and vanities of post-colonial life with fantastic zeal and subtlety." (Independent)

"The language is marvellously sculpted" (Economist)

Book Description:

Dazzling mixture of autobiography and a fictional history of colonialism

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0679761667
• ISBN 13: 9780679761662
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400