Author: V S Naipaul
Editor: Pankaj Mishra
Publisher: Picador India
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 524
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0330412906
Description
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, for the first time, his finest longer pieces of reflection and reportage are collected in one volume.
With an abiding faith in modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored a variety of societies and peoples through the many-sided prism of his won experience. Whether writing about Indian mutinies and despair, Mobutu’s mad reign in Zaire, the New York mayoral elections, or the enduring tragedy of Argentina, he demonstrates time and again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the many ways in which the world works, of the universal relation of the exploiter to the exploited. And no one has put forth a more consistently eloquent defense of the dignity of the individual and the value of civilization.
Suffused with a deeply felt humanism, The Writer and the World attests powerfully not only to V.S. Naipaul’s status as the greatest English prose stylist of our time, but also to his keen, often prophetic, understanding.
Contents
Introduction
INDIA
In the Middle of the Journey
Jamshed into Jimmy
A Second Visit
The Election in Ajmer
AFRICA AND THE DIASPORA
Papa and the Power Set
The Shipwrecked Six Thousand
The Ultimate Colony
The Overcrowded Barracoon
Power ?
Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad: Peace and Power
A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa
The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro
AMERICAN OCCASIONS
Columbus and Crusoe
Jacques Soustelle and the Decline of the West
New York with Norman Mailer
Seinbeck in Mailer
Streinbeck in Monterey
Argentina and the Ghost of Eva Peron, 1972-1991
The Air-Conditioned bubble: The Republicans in Dallas
Heavy Manners in Grenada
A Handful of Dust: Cheddi Jagan and the Revolution in Guyana
Postscript: Our Universal Civilization
Index