Synopses & Reviews
From a master of the English language winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature a colletion of essays about reading, writing, and identity.
In these 11 pieces brought together for the first time Naipaul charts more than half a century of personal inquiry into the mysteries of written expression and of fiction in particular. Here are his boyhood experiences of reading books and his first youthful efforts at writing them; the early glimmers and evolution of ideas about the proper relation of particular literary forms to particular cultures and identities. Here, too, is Naipaul's famous comment on his putative literary forebear Conrad, and a less familiar but no less intriguing preface to the only book Naipaul's father ever published. Finally, in his celebrated Nobel Address, "Two Worlds," Naipaul reflects on the full scope of his career, rounding off the volume as an intellectual autobiography. Sustained by extraordinary powers of expression and thought, Literary Occasions 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.
Review
"Naipaul's vigorous interpretations of Conrad, Dickens, and R. K. Narayan, and candid self-disclosure cogently explicate the mysterious call to write and celebrate the radiance literature brings to lives otherwise relegated to the shadows." Donna Seaman, Booklist
Review
"[R]eflects an extraordinary life influenced by the desire to write and to understand the impact of literature....[A]llows the reader to gain a better understanding of the complex web of themes that permeate Naipaul's work. Highly recommended." Library Journal
Review
"[A] mixed bag including everything from reminiscences of his laconic childhood approach toward writing to his 1983 foreword to his celebrated 1961 novel, A House for Mr. Biswas." Publishers Weekly
Review
"The writing is...consistently eloquent and astute....Naipaul is still Naipaul. But he isn't especially well served by a very uneven volume that really seems to have been hastily assembled rather than carefully edited." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"One of Naipaul's most endearing qualities is his unfailing impulse toward honesty....The writing itself is a wonder of clarity, complex ideas given shape in simple English." Lynn Freed, The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including Half a Life, A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Table of Contents
Reading and writing, a personal account -- East Indian -- Jasmine -- Prologue to an autobiography -- Foreword to The adventures of Gurudeva -- Foreword to A house for Mr. Biswas -- Indian autobiographies -- The last of the Aryans -- Theatrical natives -- Conrad's darkness and mine -- Two worlds (Nobel lecture).