Author: Purabi Panwar
Editor(s): Purabi Panwar
Publisher: Pencraft International
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 197
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8185753547
Description
This volume brings together some of the most recent revaluations of the multifaceted oeuvre of
V S Naipaul, comprising his novels, short stories, travel writing, historical accounts, and varied essays.
"I am the sum of my books," said Sir Vidiadhar Surajpersad Naipaul in his Nobel Lecture on December 7, 2001 and went on to add, "Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last contained all the others." Naipaul the writer is certainly the sum of all his books: but his observation that each of his books stands on, grows out of, and contains all his preceding books carries much less conviction.
Focused on the author’s creative anxieties and strategies as much as on his provocative discourses on diverse nations, cultures, histories and communities across the globe, it closely critiques most of his major texts. The anthology also explores the extent of fixities and ambivalences in Naipaul’s much talked about Eurocentrism, his insights into and distortions of the past, and his assimilations/ appropriations through the deployment of the telling detail and the brilliant prose.
At once exciting and instructive, the volume richly investigates the author’s ceaseless endeavor to come to terms with the modern man’s predicament in today’s highly tangled scenario.
AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK:
It was in Oxford, when I was a graduate student, that an acquaintance recommended A House for Mr. Biswas to me; it was the first time an Indian had spoken to me warmly, or at all, of Naipaul’s fiction. I bought the book; I was astonished (in the light of what I’d heard of his temperament) by its capacity for joy. I had begun to write my first novel, and the description in Naipaul’s book of a Trinidadian Indian family, of the way of life led both inside the house and on the street, clarified to me my own subject matter – a Bengali family, a house, and a lane in south Calcutta. My discovery of Naipaul became part of my discovery of myself as a writer.
-Amit Chaudhuri
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Strange Moves: Girmitya Turns Cosmopolitan
Naipaul and the Burdens of History
An Area of Awakening: V S Naipaul in Conversation with Dileep Padgaonkar
Colonial Maladies, Postcolonial Cures? Sick Politics in A House for Mr Biswas
Very Much my Father’s Book:
Autobiographical Element in A House for Mr Biswas
The Process of Re-Location in An Area of Darkness
Postcolonial Parables of Survival: V S Naipaul’s A Flag on the Island
Exile in The Mimic Men
The Enigma of Arrival and the Comfort of Influence
A Definition of the Writing Self: The Enigma of Arrival
Identity and Sensuality in VS Naipaul’s Half a Life
Translating the Caribbean:
V S Naipaul’s Metaphorics of Mimicry
Two Cheers for the Nobel Award
On V S Naipaul
The Enigma of V S Naipaul
Contributors