A Way in the World

Jacket Description/Flap: 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. Publisher Marketing: "Most of Us Know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings." So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum - that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp - which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction, the first in seven years by one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in The Enigma of Arrival, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention. It is the story of a writer's lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance - language, character, family history - and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: "things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing." What he writes - and what his release of memory enables us to see - is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh's final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda's disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator's own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates toEngland, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling. With Proustian reflective power, with infinite warmth and humour, and with an acute intelligence, Naipaul has created a monumental tale of identity recovered and remade from undated time an Review Citations:

New York Times 12/03/1995 pg. 88 (EAN 9780679761662, Paperback)

NY Times Notable Bks of Year 01/01/1995 pg. 88 (EAN 9780679761662, Paperback)

New York Times 07/16/1995 pg. 32 (EAN 9780679761662, Paperback)

Booklist 04/01/1994 pg. 1405 (EAN 9780394564784, Hardcover)

Library Journal 05/01/1994 pg. 138 (EAN 9780394564784, Hardcover) - *Starred Review

Library Journal Prepub Alert 01/01/1994 pg. 84 (EAN 9780394564784, Hardcover)

Publishers Weekly 04/04/1994 pg. 57 (EAN 9780394564784, Hardcover) - *Starred Review

Kirkus Reviews 03/15/1994 pg. 329 (EAN 9780394564784, Hardcover)

Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/1995 pg. 477 (EAN 9780394564784, Hardcover)

Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2000 pg. 481 (EAN 9780394564784, Hardcover)

Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2006 pg. 684 (EAN 9780394564784, Hardcover)

Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2010 pg. 646 (EAN 9780394564784, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:  Naipaul, V S 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-five books of fiction and nonfiction, including "Half a Life," "A House for Mr. Biswas," "A Bend in the River, Magic Seeds" and a collection of letters, "Between Father and Son," He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.