Author: V S Naipaul
Publisher: Picador India
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 203
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0330420240
Description
From a master of the English language-winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature-a collection of essays about reading, writing and identity.
In these eleven extended pieces-brought together for the first time-Naipaul charts more than half a century of personal enquiry into the mysteries of written expression and of fiction in particulars. Here are his boyhood experiences of reading books and his first youthful efforts at writing them; the early glimmers and the evolution of ideas about the proper relation of particular literary forms to particular cultures and identities.
Here, too, are Naipaul’s observations on his putative literary forebear, Conrad, and the moving preface he wrote to the only book his father ever published. And in his celebrated Nobel lecture, Two Worlds, Naipaul reflects on the full scope of his career, rounding off the volume as an intellectual autobiography. A remarkable companion piece to his previous volume of highly acclaimed essays, The Writer and the World, and sustained by extraordinary powers of expression and thought, Literary Occasion is a stirring contribution to the fading art of the critic, and a revelation as well of a life in letters, in its many exemplary instances.
Contents
Introduction
Prologue: Reading and Writing, a Personal Account
PART ONE
East Indian
Jasmine
Prologue to an Autobiography
Foreword to The Adventures of Gurudeva
Foreword to A House for Mr Biswas
PART TWO
Indian Autobiographies
The Last of the Aryans
Theatrical Natives
Conrad’s Darkness and Mine
Postscript: Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture)
Index