guerrillas v s naipaul

Set on a troubled Caribbean island – where Asians, Africans, Americans and former British colonials co-exist in a state of suppressed hysteria – V. S. Naipaul''s Guerrillas is a novel of colonialism and revolution. A white man arrives with his mistress, an Englishwoman influenced by fantasies of native power and sexuality, unaware of the consequences of her actions. Together with a leader of the ‘revolution’, they act out a gripping drama of death, sexual violence and spiritual impotence. Guerrillas depicts a convulsion in public life, and ends in private violence. The novel comes with extraordinary force from the centre of a profound moral awareness of the world’s plight. ‘Impeccable . . . Guerrillas seems to me Naipaul’s Heart of Darkness: a brilliant artist’s anatomy of emptiness, and of despair’ – Observer

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An unrivalled and very entertaining picture of the various and sometimes bizarre strands of Indian lives in colonial Trinidad. Seepersad Naipaul is a pioneer, combining insight with high style, however strange or mundane his subject.With contextualising essays by the editors, this collection of Seepersad Naipaul’s journalism is a treasure trove of Trinidad’s social history, particularly the making of the Indo-Trinidadian community. It is also a celebration of the talent of a writer whose turn of phrase makes the case for journalism as art, and of Seepersad Naipaul as an outstanding intellectual.

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Moving beyond travelogue, V. S. Naipaul''s The Masque of Africa considers the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of African civilization. Beginning in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, Naipaul’s journey takes in Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and ends, as the country does, in South Africa.Focusing upon the theme of belief – though sometimes the political or economical realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account – Naipaul examines the fragile but enduring quality of the old world of magic. To witness the ubiquity of such ancient ritual, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of this book.‘The quality of Naipaul’s writing – simple, concise, engaging – rarely varies . . . Above all, Naipaul’s latest African journey is eyewitness reporting at its best’ TimePart of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

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Taking its title from the strangely frozen picture by the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of Arrival tells the story of a young Indian from the Caribbean arriving in post-imperial England and consciously, over many years, finding himself as a writer. It is the story of a journey, from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another, and is perhaps V.S. Naipaul’s most autobiographical work. Yet alongside this he weaves a rich and complex web of invention and observation.Finding depth and pathos in the smallest moments – the death of a cottager, the firing of an estate’s gardener – Naipaul also comprehends the bigger picture – watching as the old world is lost to the gradual but permanent changes wrought on the English landscape by the march of ‘progress’.‘Written with the expected beauty of style . . . Instead of diminishing life, Naipaul ennobles it’ Anthony Burgess, The ObserverNow part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

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During forty years of travel, V. S. Naipaul has created a wide-ranging body of work, an exceptional and sustained meditation on our world. Now his finest pieces of reflection and reportage – many of which have been unavailable for some time – are collected in one volume. With an abiding faith in modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies and peoples through the prism of his experience. Whether writing about Indian mutinies and despair, Mobutu’s mad reign in Zaire, or the New York mayoral elections, he demonstrates time and again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the ways in which the world works. Infused with a deeply felt humanism, The Writer and the World attests powerfully not only to Naipaul’s status as the great English prose stylist of our time but also to his keen, often prophetic, understanding. ‘All [of these essays] are worth reading (and rereading), both for the contemporary and historical information and insight they artfully impart and for what they tell us about a uniquely complex writer’ Spectator

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Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul's sequel to Half a Life – a spare, searing novel about identity and idealism, and their ability to shape or destroy us – republished as part of the Picador Collection.

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Heart-rending and darkly comic, V.S. Naipaul''s A House for Mr Biswas has been hailed as one of the twentieth century''s finest novels, a classic that evokes a man''s quest for autonomy against the backdrop of postcolonial Trinidad.Mr Biswas has been told since the day of his birth that misfortune will follow him – and so it has. Meaning only to avoid punishment, he causes the death of his father and the dissolution of his family. Wanting simply to flirt with a beautiful woman, he ends up married to her. But in spite of his endless setbacks, Mr Biswas is determined to achieve independence, and so he begins the gruelling struggle to buy a home of his own.Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

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V. S. Naipaul's first novel - humorous, endlessly inventive and brilliantly imagined.

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Taking its title from the strangely frozen picture by the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of Arrival tells the story of a young Indian from the Caribbean arriving in post-imperial England and consciously, over many years, finding himself as a writer. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by Harvard Professor, Maya Jasanoff.The Enigma of Arrival is the story of a journey, from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another. Finding depth in the smallest moments – the death of a cottager, the firing of an estate’s gardener – V. S. Naipaul also comprehends the bigger picture, as the old world is lost and the English landscape is changed by the march of ‘progress’. This is a moving and beautiful novel told with great dignity, compassion and candour.

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In the 1970s Shiva Naipaul travelled to Africa, visiting Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia for several months. Through his experiences, the places he visited and his various encounters, he aimed to discover what ''liberation'', ''revolution'' and ''socialism'' meant to the ordinary people. His journey of discovery is brilliantly documented in this intimate, comic and controversial portrayal of a continent on the brink of change.

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A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland.Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by internationally acclaimed author Paul Theroux.Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul’s strikingly original responses to India’s paralyzing caste system, its acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. This may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.

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At the centre of this extraordinary historical narrative are two linked themes: the grinding down of the aborigines during the long rivalries of the quest for El Dorado, the mythical kingdom of gold; and, two hundred years later, the man-made horror of the new slave colony. In The Loss of El Dorado, V. S. Naipaul shows how the alchemic delusion of El Dorado drew the small island of Trinidad into the vortex of world events, making it the object of Spanish and English colonial designs and a Mecca for treasure-seekers, slave-traders, and revolutionaries. And through an accumulation of casual, awful detail, he takes us as close as we can get to day-to-day life in the Caribbean slave plantations – at the time thought to be more brutal than their American equivalents. In this brilliantly researched book, living characters large and small are rescued from the records and set in a larger, guiding narrative – about the New World, empire, African slavery, revolution – which is never less than gripping.

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With a preface by the author.V. S. Naipaul''s The Mimic Men is a profound, moving and often humorous novel that evokes a colonial man’s experience in the post-colonial world. Born of Indian heritage, raised in the British-dependent Caribbean island of Isabella, and educated in England, forty-year-old Ralph Singh has spent a lifetime struggling against the torment of cultural displacement. Now in exile from his native country, he has taken up residence at a quaint hotel in a London suburb, where he is writing his memoirs in an attempt to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the cultural paradoxes and tainted fantasies of his colonial childhood and later life: his attempts to fit in at school, his short-lived marriage to an ostentatious white woman. But it is the return to Isabella and his subsequent immersion in the roiling political atmosphere of a newly self-governing nation – every kind of racial fantasy taking wing – that ultimately provide Singh with the necessary insight to discover the crux of his disillusionment.‘A Tolstoyan spirit . . . The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist’ John Updike, New Yorker

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