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A Way In The World (1995)

A Way in the World (1995)

Book Info

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Rating
3.39 of 5 Votes: 4
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ISBN
043339711X (ISBN13: 9780679761662)
Language
English
Publisher
vintage

About book A Way In The World (1995)

ere is an interesting discovery. Not for the literary world. The man has a Nobel Prize, after all. But for me, Naipaul was an unknown quantity. So much so that (ignorance confessed here) I thought he was an Indian writer. In a way he is, I guess, his parents being Indian emigrants. (if you can call and indentured servant a true emigrant) But not really, since he was raised in Trinidad and has spend much of his life in the U.K. and Africa and, and, and, and so on. A citizen of the world. And he’s a writer of the world and its history. A Way In the World seems like the title of a modest tale, perhaps tracing the footsteps of a single individual (Note that it’s not THE way OF the world) making a tentative way through life. In fact, it’s both an individual first person tale that has the feel of a memoir, and a sweeping historical novel that covers a span of four hundred years of the history of colonization. And, although the memoir appellation is accurate, the narrator’s voice also has from time to time the quality of an academic--an historian, perhaps, or an anthropologist--describing the process and results of careful research. We meet Sr. Walter Raleigh in old age, on his last voyage to the new world trying vainly to substantiate his claims of discovered El Dorado and avoid decapitation by King James. We meet Senor Miranda of Venezuela, another adventurer intent on becoming ruler of his native country, but seeking to do so by enlisting the support of various Europeans. We meet Monsieur Lebrun, an early twentieth-century Trinidadian seeking to free his country of colonial domination and being misunderstood and reviled along the way. Some of the more modern historical figures become characters in the narrator’s own life, and we see through his reactions to them the difficulties of one culture or way of life trying to adapt to another. Literally, in a couple of instances, trying to swallow another, as the narrator fails in his attempts to eat, for example, gefilte fish while others glory in the feast. This loss of appetite, failure to assimilate, stands, I believe for the failure of colonists and colonized to merge. What happens instead is that one erases the other. When I began to write of it, the Trinidadian landscape that was present to me was the landscape I had known as a child and felt myself part of . . . Then, upon his return to Trinidad after a long absence: The landscape I had grown up in, and felt myself part of, had been wiped clean of this other past. . . .[and] the aboriginals of our own island offered less to the imagination than the still living people we read about . . . in the geography class. Eskimos crawling in and out of their warm . . . igloos. . . Thus, to be colonized is to have a hunk of one’s past, and by inference a hunk of one’s identity, destroyed. Yet, the colonizer does not escape corruption. Lives and fortunes are lost searching for El Dorados, loves sacrificed for the sake of a concept imposed on a landscape and people it does not fit. Yet, Naipaul tells this with such such simplicity, such seeming objectivity, that there’s not a trace of the anger or victimhood one would expect from a work on this subject. Instead, there is an admiration for the striving and ambition human enterprise, however maliciously intended. And a sadness for the futility of great dreams gone awry. I will return to Naipaul. I’m sorry I waited so long to find my way to him.

V. S. Naipaul, due to his own identity, always writes about the third world under colonialism. A way in the world also talks about the complicated issues such as colonialism, revolution, cultural conflicts as usual. This book is mainly based on his own life experience start as a young man living in colonialized Trinidad, later left for England and became a writer. His writing style is quite amazing due to the fact that this book combined autobiography and fiction. The most impressive thing about this book is he successfully wrote out the sense of powerless and desperate when somebody’s ambition about revolution was totally smashed by reality. Naipaul truly captured the unexpected twists and turns of life; sometimes the humor and irony in his book make those atmosphere of failure become less depressing, but more like a black comedy. Compared to similar writers such as Ondaatje and J. M. Coetzee, Naipaul is more like a realistic. He will certainly write vicious comments on his own country, which actually shows his honesty as a writer. However, since the book is half-autobiography, and the author did make it very clear about time and actual incidents on history, the story becomes quite confusing. Still, it should be regarded as a masterpiece.

Do You like book A Way In The World (1995)?

A complex book with elements of autobiography, "A Way in the World" is on one level a story about a Caribbean writer of Indian descent finding his footing as a writer. Interspersed are three partial stories of would-be conquerors of America, Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh and Francisco Miranda, stuck in the Caribbean at their point of failure. The historical passages are fascinating, detailed, and heartbreaking, enriching and expanding my previous views of those colonial times. The author builds the South American continent into the sum of dreams, memories, savagery, ingrained prejudices, and ultimate unknowability that is also our own hearts.
—Francesca

There was a cricket player, a spinner called Nagamootoo, some years ago in a West Indian team I saw on television. I was intrigued; the name could only be a version of Nagamuthu, an unmistakable and typical name straight from the Tamil heartlands. And it made me think of how the name could have gone to the islands, would it have been his father or his grandfather who had gone and settled in the West Indies, would they speak some form of Tamil at home, would there be idols of Ganesh (Pillaiyar in Tamil) in a 'pooja' room and so on. He carried a connection to me, a language that he would probably have never known, but the connection was there.It is these connections that bubble up and disturb in what is one of the most brilliant books I've ever read. I must note that if such a book, so far away from the literary forms we know and recognize, would have written by anyone else, we all would have dismissed it as a freak show. But this is Naipaul. So we all pay attention.The book is fiction, non-fiction and autobiography. It is also Naipaul looking at himself through different lenses, a sort of memoir. Whatever it is, it is infinitely beautiful as a portrait of a land and a people.There are several narratives in the book, distinct and yet woven together, like the intricacies of post-colonial West Indian society - the Indian merchant settlers, the African plantation slaves, the fleeing aborigines, the lost Chinese, and of course the English and the Spanish. The major narratives are factual/fictional accounts of 1. Naipaul's own early life as a writer,2. A fellow Trinidadian's (of the left-leaning, revolutionary variety) life and writing3. A fading (but important to Naipaul) English writer 4. Sir Walter Raleigh (whom we see looking for El Dorado in the Caribbean, and failing) 5. Francisco de Miranda ( whom we find trying to liberate Spanish South America, and failing).Each of these narratives has only one thing in common - the Caribbean, and it is through this lens that we look at history and culture and ambition and ultimately, failure. Loss and colonial baggage are what the themes mainly are, but the book is also about other things, bigger than the characters we meet. There are unforgettable characters in each section, beautiful, terrible, impossible characters. And the writing is just magnificent. The words seem to flow like the old stream near the old estates in Port of Spain that Naipaul describes, lonely and cool and dazzling at the same time.This was my first Naipaul, and it has been a tumultuous initiation; this is high class literature.At the end of the prelude, there is this line I loved - "We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves."That is what the book is, in the end, an attempt at understanding who and what we are. A attempt that, as the author wants us to understand, will always be doomed to fail. Therein lie the questions and the answers we all seek.
—Sairam Krishnan

I have said in my comments on this site that I think that the millenarian tendencies of some of my more, shall we say, zealous Christian forebears, might have made me keenly receptive to dystopic narratives, among other grim eschatological works. We know there are talents as well as resemblances, not to say cognitive skills and deficits, that pass from one generation to the next. Having said that, and having just finished my second reading of this Naipaul gem, I wonder if Naipaul's own forebears might not have prepared him for a certain hyper-vigilance to status and caste. Naipaul is descended from a high-caste Brahmin family. One of the singular features of all of his work has always been a hyper-awareness of status that is unlike anything I know in any other contemporary writer. Who stands where in the social pecking order, how that standing has altered over time, whether someone is higher in repute, fame, success, than they were in the past, or lower and why —all of these concerns fascinate Naipaul. Now, you could argue, I suppose, 'well, he's a writer, naturally he would have keen observations about character and related matters.' To that I would respond, yes, true, but there is something unique about the content of Naipaul's observations and his remarks upon them. There is a pitiless honesty, yes, but also something more. Is this the result of some kind of genetic hardwiring? This is something the cognitive sciences have only begun to study. So I wanted to think out loud a little here, and ask if my Naipaul-loving GR friends might have any insight into this aspect of his work. Has anyone else marked this penchant of Naipaul's?PS: Please read Brent Staples review of A Way in the World from the New York Times. I think it's excellent.http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/07...
—William1

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