Mr Stone likes to be known as Head Librarian with Excal, and dislikes the prospect of retirement. After a brief acquaintanceship with Mrs Springer, he marries her to defend himself against idleness and solitude. Then a foolproof plan strikes him, to introduce the order of the Knights Companion.

Mr. Stone

L'Inde: Un million de révoltes

L'Enigme de l'arrivée est un des plus grands romans autobiographiques de V.S. Naipaul (prix Nobel de littérature 2001). Il raconte son arrivée dans le Wiltshire à la fin des années 1960. Après dix années de périgrinations à travers le monde, l'écrivain cherche l'apaisement. Le récit oscille entre descriptions et remémorations, paysage intérieur et paysage extérieur, le moi et les autres. Sage spectateur de la vie des habitants du hameau, il absorbe leurs faits et gestes pour en faire l'« impulsion » de son récit ; impulsion lui permettant de revenir sur son passé, son départ de Trinidad et son arrivée à Londres. Dans le calme d'un manoir qui est l'anglicité même, un écrivain appelle à lui ses souvenirs cosmopolites : « Avec ce livre, je voulais célébrer mon bonheur. »

L'Enigme de l'arrivée

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India.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 apparently serene acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. The result may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Le Regard De L'inde

L'Enigme de l'arrivee est un des plus grands romans autobiographiques de V.S. Naipaul (prix Nobel de litterature 2001). Il raconte son arrivee dans le Wiltshire a la fin des annees 1960. Apres dix annees de perigrinations a travers le monde, l'ecrivain cherche l'apaisement. Le recit oscille entre descriptions et rememorations, paysage interieur et paysage exterieur, le moi et les autres. Sage spectateur de la vie des habitants du hameau, il absorbe leurs faits et gestes pour en faire l' impulsion de son recit; impulsion lui permettant de revenir sur son passe, son depart de Trinidad et son arrivee a Londres. Dans le calme d'un manoir qui est l'anglicite meme, un ecrivain appelle a lui ses souvenirs cosmopolites: Avec ce livre, je voulais celebrer mon bonheur.

L'Enigme de l'Arrivée

A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say "Slum!" because he could see no more. But to its residents this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. There's Popo the carpenter, who neglects his livelihood to build "the thing without a name." There's 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. There's the lovely Mrs. Hereira, in thrall to her monstrous husband. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.Set during World War II and narrated by an unnamed, but precociously observant, neighborhood boy, Miguel Street is a work of mercurial mood shifts, by turns sweetly melancholy and anarchically funny. It overflows with life on every page.

Miguel Street

B>With an introduction by author Teju Cole, A House for Mr Biswas is Nobel Prize in Literature winner V. S. Naipaul's unforgettable masterpiece. Heart-rending and darkly comic, it 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 post-colonial Trinidad./b>He was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk in through his own front gate, to bar entry to whoever he wished, to close his doors and windows every night.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 marrying her, and reluctantly relying on her domineering family for support.  But in spite of endless setbacks, Mr. Biswas is determined to achieve independence, and so he begins his gruelling struggle to buy a home of his own.

A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS

V.S. Naipaul undertook this Caribbean journey at the invitation, in 1960, of Dr Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad, the authors birthplace.         At that time, the plantation colonies of the region were formed, culturally, in the image of the metropolis. Racial and political assertion had yet to catch up with them in varying ways.         In Trinidad, African racialism found itself at odds with old colonial mimicry; forty years on, the racial issue will not be between black and white, but between black and Asian. Guyana was Marxist, but with the same racial divisions: forty years on, the country will be so ruined that a newspaper will be regarded almost as a luxury item.         In Surinam, a movement was afoot to replace the Dutch language with a pidgin English called talkie-talkie: forty years on, that racial sentiment will have led to military dictatorship and an exodus of the locals to Holland. Whereas Martinique, defying geography, saw itself as France.         And, in Jamaica, such rejectionism took the form of Rastafarianism  which, absurdly, turns out to have been the invention of Italian black propaganda during the Abyssinian War of the 1930s.          The Middle Passage  catches this poor topsy-turvy world at a critical moment: a world by turns sad, earnest and hilarious  indeed, a perfect subject for the understanding and comedy of this great writer.

Mr. Stone

Résumé

Plus de livres de V.S. Naïpaul

Critiques

Ce livre n'a pas encore de critiques