V.S. Naipaul, página 3 de 10

A profound novel from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

V. S. Naipauls meditative novel about a stranger in a strange land.

This is one of V. S. Naipauls greatest novels, hard but full of pity. It won the Booker Prize, in its original edition, in 1971.

"A Turn in the South" is a reflective journey by V. S. Naipaul in the late 1980s through the American South. Naipaul writes of his encounters with politicians, rednecks, farmers, writers, ordinary men and women, both black and white, with the insight and originality we expect from one of our best travel writers. Fascinating and poetic, this is a remarkable book on race, culture and country. 'Naipaul's writing is supple and fluid, meticulously crafted, adventurous and quick to surprise. And, as usual, there's the freshness and originality of his way of looking at things ...a fine book by a fine man, and one to be read with great enjoyment: a book of style, sagacity and wit' - "Sunday Times". 'A tissue of brilliantly recorded hearsay, of intense listening by a man with a remarkable ear' - "New York Times Review of Books".

Just 40, Ralph Singh - a disgraced colonial minister exiled from Isabella, the Caribbean island of his birth - writes his autobiography in a genteel hotel in a run-down London suburb. The author also wrote "The Mystic Masseur", "A House for Mr Biswas" and "The Middle Passage".

The three stories in this book, "The Suffrage of Elvira, A Flag on the Island" and "Mr. Stone and the Knight's Companion, " take readers from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad to a rooming house in London, all in Naipaul's bizarre international style.

V.S. Naipaul's incisive narrative powers and clear-eyed view of modern and traditional societies are clearly demonstrated in the Prologue and chapter one from A House for Biswas; "Jasmine" from The Overcrowded Barracoon; "Synthesis and Mimicry" from India: A Wounded Civilization; the dinner party vignette from "Half a Life"; and many more.

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhis Emergency, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years before. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece of journalism and cultural analysis, a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by repeated foreign invasions and immured in a mythic vision of its past. Drawing on novels, news reports, and political memoirs -- but most of all on his conversations with ordinary Indians, from princes to engineers and feudal village autocrats -- Naipaul captures Indias manifold complexities.