Those Difficult Years

Review essay of 'Letters Between and Father and Son' and 'Reading and Writing: A Personal Account' by V.S. Naipaul. The letters of the Naipaul family are compared with the fictional version of events in 'A House for Mr Biswas'

Lives in halves: A homage to Vidiadhar Naipaul

Literary and film scholar Vijay Mishra highlights the similarities of his life with Vidiadhar Naipaul, in paying tribute to writer V.S. Naipaul on being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for 2001. He suggests that Naipaul has lived his life in halves, as part of the Indian diaspora in Fiji and then in Trinidad which he considers 'half-baked societies', but it is these societies which have provided him his experiences and stories for his books

Naipaul's Women.

V.S. Naipaul's three novels of the 1970s (In a Free State, Guerrillas and A Bend in the River) earned him a reputation as a misogynist. The only sustained critical examination of women in his fiction came in the late seventies and eighties as a reaction to these novels. In this paper I attempt a survey of female characters in Naipaul's fiction across his whole career to establish to what extent this reputation is justified, and whether his harsh treatment of some female characters is matched by equally critical attitudes to male characters. While early conditioning has given Naipaul a traditional view of women’s roles, he cannot be said to show a consistent dislike of women, as his female characters range from the admirable to the repugnant in the same way as his male characters do. Much of the misogyny identified by critics is, on closer examination, attributable to characters rather than Naipaul himself

The Concept of Misfit in Postcolonial Literature in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay

Zadanie pt. „Digitalizacja i udostępnienie w Cyfrowym Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego kolekcji czasopism naukowych wydawanych przez Uniwersytet Łódzki” nr 885/P-DUN/2014 dofinansowane zostało ze środków MNiSW w ramach działalności upowszechniającej nauk

Revising the Lessons of the Masters

Themes of authentication and displacement explored by Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady, a novel later refigured by W. Somerset Maugham in his The Razor’s Edge, have been adapted by V.S. Naipaul in Half a Life. The novels combine to produce an intertextual discourse concerning the post-colonial product of England’s imperialistic appetite that dominated much of the world over the past three centuries. The tangled links between the three books, and particularly Naipaul’s examination of the imbricated layers of self-authentication and imperialism that inform James and Maugham, are the focus of my study

The Post-War Novel in Crisis: Three Perspectives

Three major novelists of the period following the second world war, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and V.S. Naipaul, have pondered the question of why the post-war novel is unable to achieve the heights of its nineteenth-century predecessors. Each of these three writers has suggested remedies, to which they have aspired with varying degrees of success. And each of them offers, implicitly or explicitly, different reasons for the change. In this essay I will evaluate their arguments and attempt to account for some of the factors which give rise to the consciousness that they are different in some qualitative way from their predecessors. I will also discuss the effect such attitudes may have on their own work

The long walk home : V.S. Naipaul and the narration of home

Author's OriginalThe topic of this paper is to explore Naipaul’s juxtaposition of the narratives of India he heard while growing up with that of his first visit to India as recounted in An Area of Darkness. Ultimately, Naipaul discovers that the notions of India (in family lore and physically) are incompatible. Furthermore, this paper argues that home for Naipaul exists within his writing and not in a geographically specific place such as Trinidad, India, or England.Martino, A. (2005). The Long Walk Home: V.S. Naipaul and the Narration of Home. Interactions: A Journal of British and American Literature and Culture 14(1), 175-182