Synopses & Reviews
Spanning four decades and four continents, this magisterial volume brings together the essential shorter works of reflection and reportage by our most sensitive, literate, and undeceivable observer of the post-colonial world. In its pages V. S. Naipaul trains his relentless moral intelligence on societies from India to the United States and sees how each deals with the challenges of modernity and the seductions of both the real and mythical past.
Whether he is writing about a string of racial murders in Trinidad; the mad, corrupt reign of Mobutu in Zaire; Argentina under the generals; or Dallas during the 1984 Republican Convention, Naipaul combines intellectual playfulness with sorrow, indignation, and analysis so far-reaching that it approaches prophecy. The Writer and the World reminds us that he is in a class by himself.
Review
"[Naipaul] is indeed a master stylist, his prose precise and fresh. Yet always beating below the words is a true and tender heart....[M]any consider [him] to be the greatest living writer in the English language." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Naipaul has virtually no peers as a writer of intensely literary but thoroughly well-reported journalism....A welcome summing-up of a distinguished journalistic career that matches Naipaul's accomplishments as a novelist." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"[R]igorously observed, eloquently composed....A writer who cherishes intellectual adventure, Naipaul grieves for all who are denied a genuine worldview, and the freedom to act on it." Donna Seaman, Booklist
Synopsis
Spanning four decades and four continents, this magisterial volume brings together the essential shorter works of reflection and reportage by the Nobel Prize-winning author. "The most splendid writer.... He looks into the mad eye of history and does not blink." --The Boston Globe
V.S. Naipaul is our most sensitive, literate, and undeceivable observer of the post-colonial world. In these pages, he trains his relentless moral intelligence on societies from India to the United States and sees how each deals with the challenges of modernity and the seductions of both the real and mythical past.
Whether he is writing about a string of racial murders in Trinidad; the mad, corrupt reign of Mobutu in Zaire; Argentina under the generals; or Dallas during the 1984 Republican Convention, Naipaul combines intellectual playfulness with sorrow, indignation, and analysis so far-reaching that it approaches prophecy. The Writer and the World reminds us that he is in a class by himself.
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 Oxford he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990. He lives in Wiltshire, England.