A way in the world

A Way in the World is a vastly innovative novel exploring colonial inheritance through a series of narratives that span continents, swing back and forth between past and present and delve into both autobiography and fiction.

V. S. Naipaul offers a personal choice of examples of Spanish and British imperial history in the Caribbean, including an imagined vision of Raleigh's last expedition and an introduction to Francisco de Miranda, a would-be liberator and precursor to Bolívar, which are placed within a context of echoing modernity and framed by two more personal, heavily autobiographical sections sketching the narrator - an eloquent yet humble man of Indian descent who grew up in Trinidad but spent much of his adult life in England and Africa.

Meditative and dramatic, these historical reconstructions, imbued with Naipaul's acute perception, drawn with his deft and sensitive touch, and told in his beautifully wrought prose, are transmuted into an astonishing novel exploring the profound and mysterious effect of history on the individual.

Author Notes

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born of Indian ancestry in Chaguanas, Trinidad on August 17, 1932. He was educated at University College, Oxford and lived in Great Britain since 1950. From 1954 to 1956, he edited a radio program on literature for the British Broadcasting Corporation's Caribbean Service.

His first novel, The Mystic Masseur, was published in 1957. His other novels included A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, Guerrillas, and Half a Life. In a Free State won the Booker Prize in 1971. He started writing nonfiction in the 1960s. His first nonfiction book, The Middle Passage, was published in 1962. His other nonfiction works included An Area of Darkness, Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, and A Turn in the South. He was knighted in 1990 and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He died on August 11, 2018 at the age of 85.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews 3

Publisher's Weekly Review

Billed by the publisher as Naipaul's first novel since The Enigma of Arrival in 1987, this can really be regarded as fiction only by the most extremely elastic definition. It is in fact a series of extended essays, meditations and dramatized historical reconstructions that originally carried the perhaps more fitting subtitle ``A Sequence.'' Naipaul ruminates, with all his acute intelligence, on how history shapes personality--and vice versa. The book begins and ends with unexpectedly personal autobiographical sketches of Naipaul: as a boy in Trinidad; as a bright young clerk with a scholarship and a future; as a fledgling writer struggling in London; and, finally, in a later period, in an unnamed East African country where he reencounters a character from his youth. These flank two much longer pieces, which are both poignant and superbly realized portraits of elderly figures whose once-powerful lives were wrecked, more than 200 years apart, by their efforts to exploit, economically and politically, the corner of South America where Trinidad looks across the Bay of Paria to the swampy mainland of Venezuela. Sir Walter Raleigh came twice, with dreams of gold fathered by Columbus, and is seen on his last voyage, about to return to death in the Tower. Francisco Miranda, an astonishing, courtly con man who used, and was used by, both British and Spanish governments as a would-be ``liberator'' of Latin America in the late 18th century, is seen in fragile Trinidadian exile, exchanging thoughtful, chatty letters with his wife in London. Naipaul's mastery of his material is absolute, and his seemingly effortless, beautifully wrought prose carries the reader to the heart of the mysteries of human destiny. 35,000 first printing. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Naipaul has redefined the genre of historical fiction in this curiously old-fashioned, matter-of-fact, yet utterly eviscerating sequence of linked stories. These tales are told, not dramatized, a subtle narrative style that bespeaks authority and reflection. Our eloquent yet humble narrator and moral guide is an unnamed man of Indian descent who grew up on Trinidad but spent much of his adult life in England and Africa. He has several preoccupations. One is his slow and painful evolution as a writer; another is the symbiotic relationship between writing and history; and a third is the mercenary age of European exploration and conquest. Trinidad serves as a microcosm of the exploitation, volatile racial overlays, and barely controlled chaos of the so-called New World. Our narrator, who came of age just after World War II, is keenly attuned to the ugly fact that his island's history has been "burnt away." An uneasy mix of transplanted Africans, Indians, and whites circle suspiciously around each other, ripe for some sort of insurrection, a state of affairs as volatile now as it was in the early seventeenth century. Several stories profile revolutionary, but mad and delusional, figures, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, on his desperate journey back across the Atlantic in search of gold and redemption, and the crazy Venezuelan con man Francisco Miranda, who tried to invade South America and establish one immense republic. Each story ponders the betrayals and follies that have wreaked havoc in the nations of the Caribbean and Africa, acts of greed, ignorance, and hatred that are, sadly, quintessentially human. But so is the urge to tell stories, to live and to learn. (Reviewed Apr. 1, 1994)0394564782Donna Seaman

Library Journal Review

After seven years, Naipaul returns to fiction to explore the sources and implications of his feelings of rootlessness, the realities of the colonial experience, the impact of cultural displacement, and our need to belong. He does so through a series of linked historical narratives. Among them is an imagined vision of Raleigh's desperate but futile search for El Dorado. We are also introduced to Francisco de Miranda, one of the precursors to Bolivar's revolution. We are witness to the irony inherent in the life of Lebrun, a Trinidadian/Panamanian Communist of the 1930s. And then there is Blair, a former co-worker of the narrator in Trinidad, whose African roots prove no help when he becomes an adviser to an East African despot. These are tales of lost souls desperate to find a place at the table but who never quite succeed, leaving them doomed to remain on the fringes of history. A work from a fine and thoughtful storyteller that belongs in all collections of serious fiction. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/94.]-David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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