A collection of three classic books by V. S. Naipaul. with an introduction from Paul Theroux, author of The Great Railway Bazaar. V. S. Naipaul first visited India in 1962 at twenty-nine. He returned in 2015 at eighty-two. The intervening years and visits sparked by an inquisitiveness about a country he had never seen but had been a dream of his since childhood have resulted in three books: India: An Area of Darkness, A Wounded Civilization and A Million Mutinies Now. India is the collection of all three, introduced by fellow traveller and writer Paul Theroux. An Area of Darkness is V. S. Naipaul's semi-autobiographical account - at once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered - of his first visit to India, the land of his forebears. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent. India was land of myths, an area of darkness closing up behind him as he travelled. What emerged was a masterful work of literature that provides a revelation both of India and of himself: a displaced person who paradoxically possesses a stronger sense of place than almost anyone. India: A Wounded Civilization casts a more analytical eye than before over Indian attitudes, while recapitulating and further probing the feelings aroused in him by this vast, mysterious, and agonized country. A work of fierce candour and precision, it is also a generous description of one man's complicated relationship with the country of his ancestors. India: A Million Mutinies Now is the fascinating account of Naipaul's return journey to India and offers a kaleidoscopic, layered travelogue, encompassing a wide collage of religions, castes, and classes at a time when the percolating ideas of freedom threatened to shake loose the old ways. The brilliance of the book lies in Naipaul's approach to a shifting, changing land from a variety of perspectives. India: A Million Mutinies Now is a truly perceptive work whose insights continue to inform travellers of all generations to India.

India - An Area Of Darkness, A Wounded Civilization & A Million Mutinies Now

V. S. Naipaul's first travel book, The Middle Passage, takes us on a rich and emotional journey to a place of the greatest interest - his birthplace. In 1960, Dr Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad, invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit his native country and record his impressions. In this classic of modern travel writing he created a deft and remarkably prescient portrait of Trinidad and the Caribbean societies of four adjacent countries, Guyana, Surinam, Martinique and Jamaica. Haunted by the legacies of slavery and colonialism, and so thoroughly defined by the norms of Empire that it can scarcely comprehend its end, Naipaul catches this poor, topsy-turvy world at a critical moment, a time when racial and political assertion had yet to catch up - a perfect subject for the acute understanding and dazzling prose of this great writer. 'Naipaul travels with the artist's eye and ear and his observations are sharply discerning.' Evelyn Waugh 'Belongs in the same category of travel writing as Lawrence's books on Italy, Greene's on West Africa and Pritchett's on Spain' New Statesman

The Middle Passage - Impressions of Five Colonial Societies

In 1950, V. S. Naipaul travelled from Trinidad to England to take up a place at Oxford University. Over the next few years, letters passed back and forth between Naipaul and his family - particularly his beloved father Seepersad, but also his mother and siblings. The result is a fascinating chronicle of Naipaul's time at university; the love of writing that he shared with his father and their mutual nurturing of literary ambition; the triumphs and depressions of Oxford life; and the travails of his family back at home. Letters Between a Father and Son is an engrossing collection continuing into the early years of V. S. Naipaul's literary career, touching time and again on the craft of writing, and revealing the relationships and experiences that formed and influenced one of the greatest and most enigmatic literary figures of our age. 'Rare and precious .

Letters Between a Father and Son

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

With a preface by the author. V. S. Naipaul's legendary command of broad comedy and acute social observation is on abundant display in these classic works of fiction - two novels and a collection of stories - that capture the rhythms of life in the Caribbean and England with impressive subtlety and humour. The Suffrage of Elvira is Naipaul's hilarious take on an electoral campaign in the back country of Trinidad, where the candidates' tactics include blatant vote-buying and supernatural sabotage. The eponymous protagonist of Mr Stone and the Knights Companion is an ageing Englishman of ponderously regular habits whose life is thrown into upheaval by a sudden marriage and an unanticipated professional advancement. And the stories in A Flag on the Island take us from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad - whose black proprietor faces bankruptcy until he takes a Chinese name - to a rooming house in London, where the genteel landlady plays a nasty Darwinian game with her budgerigars. Unfailingly stylish, filled with intelligence and feeling, The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book is the work of a writer who can do just about anything that can be done with language. 'V. S. Naipaul has a substantial claim as a comic writer .

The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book - and Other Comic Inventions

Miguel Street, V. S. Naipaul's first written work of fiction, is set in a derelict corner of Port of Spain, Trinidad, during World War Two and is narrated by an unnamed, precociously observant neighbourhood boy. We are introduced to a galaxy of characters, from Popo the carpenter, who neglects his livelihood to build 'the wild thing without a name', to Man-man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion, and the dreaded Big-Foot, the bully with glass tear ducts. As well as the lovely Mrs Hereira, in thrall to her monstrous husband. V. S. Naipaul writes with prescient wisdom and crackling wit about the lives and legends that make up Miguel Street: a living theatre, a world in microcosm, a cacophony of sights, sounds and smells - all seen through the eyes of a fatherless boy. The language, the idioms and the observations are priceless and timeless and Miguel Street overflows with life on every page. This is an astonishing novel about hope, despair, poverty and laughter; and an enchanting and exuberant tribute to V. S. Naipaul's childhood home.

Miguel Street

Part meditation, part remembrance, A Writer's People by V. S. Naipaul is a privileged insight, full of gentleness, humour and feeling, into the mind of one of our greatest writers. For the 'serious traveller', one who is fully engaged with the world, there can be no single view. Our author's purpose, then, 'is not literary criticism or biography', but only to set out the writing and ways of seeing to which he was exposed. So here is colonial Trinidad (the early Derek Walcott and Naipaul's own father); the culture of school (Flaubert and the classical world); England, where with the help of friends the writer seeks to make his way; and, inevitably for a colonial Indian, there is India, to be approached through the residue of Indian culture and the scattered memories of nineteenth-century immigrants, leading to a special understanding of Mahatma Gandhi.

A Writer's People - Ways of Looking and Feeling

A Turn in the South is a reflective journey by V. S. Naipaul in the late 1980s through the American South. Naipaul writes of his encounters with politicians, rednecks, farmers, writers and ordinary men and women, both black and white, with the insight and originality we expect from one of our best travel writers. Fascinating and poetic, this is a remarkable book on race, culture and country. 'Naipaul's writing is supple and fluid, meticulously crafted, adventurous and quick to surprise. And, as usual, there's the freshness and originality of his way of looking at things' Sunday Times 'Naipaul writes as if a modern oracle has chosen to speak through him. It is a tissue of brilliantly recorded hearsay, of intense listening by a man with a remarkable ear' New York Times Review of Books 'This is a journey below the Mason-Dixon line into a society riven by too many defeats; the broken cause of the old Confederacy, and the frustrated anger of Southern blacks whose power is circumscribed .

A Turn in the South

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, plus connu sous la signature V. S. Naipaul, né le 17 août 1932 à Chaguanas à Trinité-et-Tobago et mort le 11 août 2018 à Londres au Royaume-Uni, est un écrivain britannique, lauréat du prix Nobel de littérature en 2001.

Je pouvais rencontrer des gens terribles et finir par voir le monde à travers leurs yeux, voir leurs fragiles, leurs besoins.

Les gens vont et viennent tout le temps; Le monde a toujours été en mouvement.

Je pense toujours que c'est vraiment très merveilleux quand j'ai lu une de mes phrases et qu'elle a cette qualité de durée de durée.

Comment pouvez-vous être athée et avoir une idéologie pour l'accompagner? Être athée, c'est être libre de certains domaines de croyance. Je ne vois pas comment cela peut devenir une idéologie.

La vie n'a pas un début soigné et une fin bien rangée; La vie se passe toujours. Vous devriez commencer au milieu et se terminer au milieu, et tout devrait être là.

Vous avez besoin de quelqu'un pour voir ce que vous avez fait, le lire et le comprendre et apprécier ce qui est allé dedans.

Quoi qu'il en soit, il y a en moi à un moment donné n'est pas entièrement formé. J'en suis à peine conscient; Il attend le prochain livre. Ça va - avec chance - venez à moi pendant l'écriture réelle, et cela me prendra par surprise

Il est important de ne pas trop faire confiance aux gens.

Si les écrivains s'assoient et parlent d'oppression, ils ne feront pas beaucoup d'écriture.

Les hommes ont besoin d'une histoire; Cela les aide à avoir une idée de qui ils sont. Mais l'histoire, comme la sainteté, peut résider dans le cœur; Il suffit qu'il y ait quelque chose là-bas.

Le monde est ce qu'il est; Les hommes qui ne sont rien qui ne se permettent de devenir rien, n'ont pas de place.

Ce qui était passé était passé. Je suppose que c'était l'attitude générale.

Comment les gens comme ceux-ci pourraient-ils, sans parler de leurs émotions et passions, gérer? Ils ne pouvaient, au mieux, souffrir que de dimbolique. Leurs douleurs et leurs humiliations s'exécuteraient seuls dans leurs personnages: comme les mauvais esprits possédant un corps, afin que le corps lui-même puisse sembler innocent de ce qu'il a fait.

L'un est fait par toutes les choses autour d'une. Il y a beaucoup de choses qui en ont fait une. Pour un écrivain, chercher des choses qui l'ont fait, c'est demander des problèmes. C'est comme vous donner un personnage. Je ne peux pas le faire. Je ne peux pas le faire. Ces choses sont juste là. Est-ce suffisant?

On écrit toujours de la comédie au moment de l'hystérie la plus profonde.

Je n'étais vraiment pas équipé pour être écrivain quand j'ai quitté Oxford. Mais ensuite je me suis mis à apprendre. J'ai toujours eu la plus haute estime pour le métier. J'ai toujours senti que c'était du travail.

J'ai lu un morceau d'écriture et dans un paragraphe ou deux, je sais si c'est par une femme ou non.

Je dirai que je suis la somme de mes livres.

Si jamais vous souhaitez rencontrer des fraudes intellectuelles en quantité, allez à Paris.

La biographie d'un écrivain - ou même de l'autobiographie - aura toujours cette incomplétude.

D'une certaine manière, ma réputation est devenue celle du curmudgeon.

Je connais mon père et ma mère, mais au-delà, je ne peux pas y aller. Mon ascendance est floue.

La chose mélancolique à propos du monde est qu'elle est pleine de gens stupides; Et le monde est géré au profit du stupide et du commun.

Un homme d'affaires est quelqu'un qui achète à dix et se contente de sortir à douze. L'autre genre d'homme achète à dix, le voit monter à dix-huit et ne fait rien. Il attend qu'il monte à vingt. Quand il tombe à deux, il attend qu'il revienne à dix.

Je pense profondément que les gens vous laissent tomber tout le temps.

Ma vie est courte. Je ne peux pas écouter la banalité.

Nous ne pouvons pas comprendre tous les traits dont nous avons hérité. Parfois, nous pouvons être étrangers à nous-mêmes.

Trinidad peut sembler complexe, mais pour quiconque le connaît, c'est une société philisante simple, coloniale.

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