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. As always, Naipaul's concern is the ways in which an individual seeks to construct some kind of order in a politically and morally chaotic world. This is one of Naipaul's most profound investigations of colonial psychology and the consequences of imperialism.
An elliptical, lyrical, vividly descriptive autobiographical account of what it's like for an Indian writer from Trinidad to settle in the rural west of England. When Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the judges commented that THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL provides an "unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture and the demise of European neighborhoods.''
A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness" "is Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul's profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul's strikingly original responses to India's paralyzing caste system, its apparently serene acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. The result may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.
In a corner of India untouched by anti-colonial agitation, Willy Chandran's father stood at odds with the world - aspiring to greatness whilst living out the dreary life marked out for him by his ancestors. In an attempt to defy his past, he marries a low-caste woman only to find himself at the mercy of his own fury. From this unhappy union the utterly compelling character of Willy Chandran emerges, oddly like his father, naively eager to find something that will place him both in and apart from the world. He is drawn to England and the immigrant community of post war London, its dingy West End clubs, and sexual encounters, and even to the eccentric milieu of the English writer. But it is Willy's first experience of love that might bring him the fulfillment he so desperately seeks.His wife Ana leads him to her home, a province of Portuguese Africa, a country whose inhabitants are all uncertainly living out the last days of colonialism. Naipaul delineates the relationship between father and son with wonderful clarity and compassion; the comic brilliance of the London scenes and the penetrating descriptions of Africa are hard to beat.
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.
El Premio Nobel de Literatura, V.S. Naipaul, nos sumerge en un apasionado y clarividente diario de viaje por la India, su pa#s natal. Trazada sin prejuicios ni sentimentalismos, la visi#n l#cida, tierna y sarc#stica de la India que ofrece V. S. Naipaul es una representaci#n viva de una sociedad compleja en la que la modernidad se teje sobre un fondo tradicional. El enfrentamiento entre musulmanes e hind#es, las transformaciones del papel de la mujer, la supervivencia de los antiguos rituales, la din#mica industrial cinematogr#fica, la nueva literatura, los cambios en la instituci#n familiar y la permanencia del sistema de castas son aspectos que no escapan a la aguda mirada del Premio Nobel de literatura. Rese#a:"Por la abundancia de talento, dif#cilmente puede existir un escritor en la actualidad que supere a V. S. Naipaul."The New York Times
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".
Una extraña y apasionante novela sobre la presencia colonial de España e Inglaterra en los territorios del Caribe narrada como una historia de fuego, sangre, pasión y ambición.
In his long-awaited, vastly innovative new novel, Naipaul, "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angles Times), spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian . . . a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work."--New York Times.
