Book description
Over the course of his astonishing fifty-year career, V. S. Naipaul's
writing has been characterized by a commitment to truth that gives his
work a unique luminosity and brilliance. In A Writer's People he brings
unmatched clarity and rich experience to an exploration of the ways we
think, see and feel. The range of this extraordinary book reflects an
intellect deeply engaged with the challenges of assimilation faced by
the 'serious traveller', one for whom there can be no single world view.
Naipaul writes about the classical world - what we have retained from
it, what we have forgotten - and the more recent past. Figures as
diverse as Mahatma Gandhi, Derek Walcott and Gustave Flaubert come under
his compassionate scrutiny, as do his own early years in Trinidad, the
silences in his family history and the roles played by Anthony Powell
and Francis Wyndham in his first encounters with literary culture. Part
meditation, part remembrance, as elegant as it is revelatory, A Writer's
People is a privileged insight, full of gentleness, humour and feeling,
into the mind of one of our greatest writers.
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.
