A Way in the World

By V.S. Naipaul

Book Overview

The Nobel Prize-winning author--and "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angeles 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."--The New York Times

"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. 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 to England, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679761667
• ISBN13: 9780679761662
• Release Date: June 1995
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Good Book

This is a good and challenging novel. It is also perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical, and brazenly so. There is no attempt on the part of the narrator (whom Naipaul uses, first to explain how the colonial baggage affects his characters [characters, incidentally, whom you've met in other Naipaul novels], and then to represent the brainchild of a number of "unwritten" stories told in "A Way in the World's" pages) to distance himself from Naipaul's own experiences in Trinidad, England, and then all over the world, as the "voice" of the former colonials. This weight of this book's message comes late, making a challenging read worthwhile.

A Worthwhile and Challenging Book

An excellent book. At times it is difficult but it is not impossible. A series of failed revolutionaries and their follies occupy the mind of a narrator, an aspiring writer seeking his place in the world. Modern day revolutions like socialism come and fail, not very different from the past where the imperial powers vied for power with a host of different racial groups in South America. This is my first book I've read from V. S. Naipaul after hearing that he won the Nobel Prize. Based on this, I'm going to read more.

A roman à clef

My primary interest in this book is the fifth story, "On the Run." This is the fictional rendering of an actual person, viz. CLR James, the Black literary, left-wing politician originally from Trinidad, the home of Naipaul. In the story James is called "Lebrun," and some of the unimportant details have been slightly altered. James, who died in 1989 in his eighties, has recently enjoyed a bit of posthumous lionization at the hands of certain left-wing writers. While Naipaul deals with him with utmost gentleness, there is no exxcaping the fact that James was an inveterate sorehead, a notorious womanizer, an energetic blowhard, a careful organizer of his own coterie in several countries. Naipaul suggests that there may also have been a sinister side to Lebrun/James. He doesn't insist, but the suggestion is there. Let the reader decide !

The work of a Master in his prime - wonderful!

This is an unusual - perhaps even unique - variety of novel, having at first glance no discernible structure and seeming like a series of meditations on the experience of West-Indian colonialism, linked by personal reminiscences of the author. It is only when the book is finished that the masterful integration of the complexities of plot, descriptions and reflections become fully obvious. Much of the work can be seen as an extended series of imagined scenes and dialogues inspired by the dominant themes of the writer's earlier non-fiction work "The Loss of El Dorado", itself a powerful and searing account of the discovery of Trinidad, its capture from the Spaniards by the British, its failed role as a springboard for incitement of revolution on the South American mainland, and its transformation into a slave society. Whereas the earlier work was strictly factual the form of the later novel allows Naipaul to use the full power of his imagination to visualise the motivations of historical players such as Raleigh and Miranda and their reactions to specific situations. There are a host of other characters however, all probably with a basis in actuality, all are realised with the same degree of keen, indeed merciless, perception that characterises Naipaul's fiction at its best. The scenes of action shift rapidly in both time and locale - from the Elizabethan age, on through the turmoil of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, right through the twentieth century to our own day, with Trinidad, Venezuela, London and an unnamed African colony (Uganda?) providing the backdrop. Those who know these societies today will be impressed by the uncanny accuracy with which their very "feel" is portrayed. This is the work of a master in his prime - wonderful!

A brilliant and imaginative tour-de-force

Mr. Naipaul never ceases to amaze in the depth and fertility of his imagination. Weaving history with fiction, biography and comedy we are never sure where he is leading in a tale spanning continents and centuries. It is a prose poetry at its finest, enveloping the reader with texts that only Naipaul his capable of. To say V.S.Naipaul is a an exquiste writer; a writer's writer would be an understatement. A Way In The World represents a novel of such genius, I was and continue to be in awe of the magnificent and masterly control of the English language. I am in love with writing again. Thank you V.S. Naipual