V. S. Naipaul

A House for Mr.Biswas

A Bend in the River

The history of Trinidad begins with a delusion: the belief that somewhere nearby on the South American mainland lay El Dorado, the mythical kingdom of gold. In this extraordinary and often gripping book, V. S. Naipaul–himself a native of Trinidad–shows how that delusion drew a small island into the vortex of world events, making it the object of Spanish and English colonial designs and a mecca for treasure-seekers, slave-traders, and revolutionaries. Amid massacres and poisonings, plunder and multinational intrigue, two themes emerge: the grinding down of the Aborigines during the long rivalries of the El Dorado quest and, two hundred years later, the man-made horror of slavery. An accumulation of casual, awful detail takes us as close as we can get to day-to-day life in the slave colony, where, in spite of various titles of nobility, only an opportunistic, near-lawless community exists, always fearful of slave suicide or poison, of African sorcery and revolt. Naipaul tells this labyrinthine story with assurance, withering irony, and lively sympathy. The result is historical writing at its highest level.

A Colonial History

The Loss of El Dorado

A curva do rio

A New York Times Notable Book Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s impassioned and prescient travelogue of his journeys through his ancestral homeland, with a new preface by the author. Arising out of Naipaul’s lifelong obsession and passion for a country that is at once his and totally alien, India: A Million Mutinies Now relates the stories of many of the people he met traveling there more than fifty years ago. He explores how they have been steered by the innumerable frictions present in Indian society—the contradictions and compromises of religious faith, the whim and chaos of random political forces. This book represents Naipaul’s last word on his homeland, complementing his two other India travelogues, An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization.

India: A Million Mutinies Now

Literary Occasions

Essays

The Writer and the World

"The Nobel Prize winner's first great novel" (Barack Obama), A House for Mr. Biswas is an unforgettable story inspired by Naipaul's father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels. In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous– and endless–struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark comedy of manners, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man’s quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.

A Novel

A House for Mr. Biswas

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

In 1950, V. S. Naipaul travelled from Trinidad to England to take up a place at Oxford University. Over the next few years letters passed back and forth between V. S. Naipaul and his family – particularly his beloved father Seepersad, but also his mother and siblings. The result is a fascinating chronicle of Naipaul’s time at university; the love of writing that he shared with his father and their mutual nurturing of literary ambition; the triumphs and depressions of Oxford life; and the travails of his family back at home. This engrossing collection has been updated with new material. Spanning the early years of V. S. Naipaul's burgeoning literary career, these letters touch time and again on the craft of writing, and reveal the relationships and experiences that formed and influenced one of the greatest and most enigmatic literary figures of our age. ‘Extraordinary and moving . . . this book is both heartening and terribly sad’ Alain de Botton, Sunday Telegraph ‘Rare and precious . . . if any modern writer was going to breathe a last gasp into the epistolary tradition, it was always likely to be V. S. Naipaul’ Robert Winder, New Statesman 'A fascinating psychological narrative' Jason Cowley, The Times

Letters Between a Father and Son

Mohun Biswas strives to own his own home which he believes will symbolize his independence from his overbearing family.

Ett hus åt Mr Biswas

Uma casa para Mr. Biswas

A stunning novel of the present moment that takes us into the hearts and minds of those who use terrorism as an ideal and a way of life, and those who aspire to the frightening power of wealth. Abandoning a life he felt was not his own, Willie Chandran (the hero of Half a Life) moves to Berlin where his sister’s radical political awakening inspires him to join a liberation movement in India. There, in the jungles and dirt-poor small villages, through months of secrecy and night marches, Willie — a solitary, inward man — discovers both the idealism and brutality of guerilla warfare. When he finally escapes the movement, he is imprisoned for the murder of three policemen. Released unexpectedly on condition he return to England, he attempts to climb back into life in the West, but his experience of wealth, love and despair in London only bedevils him further. Magic Seeds is a moving tale of a man searching for his life and fearing he has wasted it, and a testing study of the conflicts between the rich and the poor, and the struggles within each. Its spare, elegant prose sizzles with devastating psychological analysis, bleak humour and astonishing characters. Only V. S. Naipaul could have written a novel so attuned to the world and so much a challenge to it.

Magic Seeds

"Among the Believers is V.S. Naipaul's classic account of his journeys through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia; 'the believers' are the Muslims he met on those journeys, young men and women battling to regain the original purity of their faith in the hope of restoring order to a chaotic world. It is a uniquely valuable insight into modern Islam and the comforting simplifications of religious fanaticism."--Cover.

An Islamic Journey

Among the Believers

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency,” V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past. Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his own encounters with ordinary Indians–from a supercilious prince to an engineer constructing housing for Bombay’s homeless–Naipaul captures a vast, mysterious, and agonized continent inaccessible to foreigners and barely visible to its own people. He sees both the burgeoning space program and the 5,000 volunteers chanting mantras to purify a defiled temple; the feudal village autocrat and the Naxalite revolutionaries who combined Maoist rhetoric with ritual murder. Relentless in its vision, thrilling in the keenness of its prose, India: A Wounded Civilization is a work of astonishing insight and candor.

A Wounded Civilization

India

A look at Trinidad, British Guiana, Surinam, Martinique, and Jamaica focuses on the influence of European colonization on the language, politics, values, and culture of the Caribbean. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

The Caribbean Revisited

The Middle Passage

This collection of essays concentrates mainly on V.S. Naipaul's writings about India, the Americas, Africa and the Diaspora. It features pieces taken from his earlier books - The Overcrowded Barracoon, The Return of Eve Peron and Finding the Centre - and other essays.

In this work of autobiographical travel writing in India, the author desribes his encounter with a force in his life which shocked him into an awareness of a need for self-examination and self-explanation. V.S. Naipul has also written 13 works of fiction and won the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature.

An Area of Darkness

With a preface by the author. V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men is a profound, moving and often humorous novel that evokes a colonial man's experience in the post-colonial world. Born of Indian heritage, raised in the British-dependent Caribbean island of Isabella, and educated in England, forty-year-old Ralph Singh has spent a lifetime struggling against the torment of cultural displacement. Now in exile from his native country, he has taken up residence at a quaint hotel in a London suburb, where he is writing his memoirs in an attempt to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the cultural paradoxes and tainted fantasies of his colonial childhood and later life: his attempts to fit in at school, his short-lived marriage to an ostentatious white woman. But it is the return to Isabella and his subsequent immersion in the roiling political atmosphere of a newly self-governing nation - every kind of racial fantasy taking wing - that ultimately provide Singh with the necessary insight to discover the crux of his disillusionment. 'A Tolstoyan spirit . . . The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist' John Updike, New Yorker

The Mimic Men

In the tradition of political and cultural revelation V.S. Naipaul so brilliantly made his own in Among The Believers, A Turn In The South, his first book about the United States, is a revealing, disturbing, elegiac book about the American South—from Atlanta to Charleston, Tallahassee to Tuskegee, Nashville to Chapel Hill.

A Turn in the South

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, A House for Mr Biswas is V. S. Naipaul's best-loved novel.

V. S. Naipaul

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