| Language | English |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0-330-48706-x |
| No of pages | 243 |
| Font Size | Medium |
| Book Publisher | Picador |
| Published Date | 21 Sep 2001 |
About Author
Related Books
| Language | English |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0-330-48706-x |
| No of pages | 243 |
| Font Size | Medium |
| Book Publisher | Picador |
| Published Date | 21 Sep 2001 |
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul 17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018, most commonly known as V. S. Naipaul, and informally, Vida Naipaul, was a Trinidadian and Tobagonian British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English.
He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels.
He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years.
Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State. In 1989, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honor.
He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and in 2001, the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the late 19th century, Naipaul's grandparents had emigrated from India to work in Trinidad's plantations as indentured servants.
His breakthrough novel A House for Mr. Biswas was published in 1961. On the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, he dedicated it to Patricia Anne Hale, to whom he was married from 1955 until her death in 1996, and who had served as first reader, editor, and critic of his writings.
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V.S. Naipaul undertook this Caribbean journey at the invitation, in 1960, of Dr Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad, the author's birthplace. At that time, the plantation colonies of the region were formed, culturally, in the image of the metropolis.
Racial and political assertion had yet to catch up with them in varying ways. In Trinidad, African racialism found itself at odds with old colonial mimicry; forty years on, the racial issue will not be between black and white, but between black and Asian.
Guyana was Marxist, but with the same racial divisions: forty years on, the country will be so ruined that a newspaper will be regarded almost as a luxury item. In Surinam, a movement was afoot to replace the Dutch language with a pidgin English called talkie-talkie: forty years on, that racial sentiment will have led to military dictatorship and an exodus of the locals to Holland.
Whereas Martinique, defying geography, saw itself as France. And, in Jamaica, such rejectionism took the form of Rastafarianism - which, absurdly, turns out to have been the invention of Italian black propaganda during the Abyssinian War of the 1930s.
The Middle Passage catches this poor topsy-turvy world at a critical moment: a world by turns sad, earnest and hilarious - indeed, a perfect subject for the understanding and comedy of this great writer.