The Enigma Of V. S. Naipaul » (REV)

Helen Hayward is in the English Department at University College, London.

In this book, Helen Hayward presents a perceptive, well-researched, and objective study of V.S. Naipaul, and identifies the recurring themes that run through his novels, travel books short stories, articles, and interviews spanning over 40 years. Born into and raised on a colonial world, he is regarded by many as one of the most trenchant critics of the corruption, greed, and brutality of the post-colonial world. Hayward traces a pattern of themes and concerns which cast new light in the relationship between the life and the work as well as the creative process itself. She examines key Naipaulian concepts such as cultural alienation, detachment, and anxiety, relating them to the narrative of the writer's life, a story in which fact and fiction are deliberately and artistically blurred.

Library Journal

Born and raised in Trinidad, the Nobel prize-winning Naipaul moved to England to attend college and has resided there most of his life. He occupies a special niche in the literary world, one that has become more prominent in the 20th century: that of the outsider, the multiethnic, and the world traveler. Hayward (University Coll., London) draws on Naipaul's enormous body of published work-novels, short stories, journalism, television and radio work, and literary criticism-as well as his unpublished papers. Naipaul is an "enigma," Hayward contends, a writer whose life has made him the constant observer, and he is ultimately an unpredictable, ironic, and passionate artist. Although Hayward's own prose style does not flow as gracefully as her subject's, this is a compact and thorough study of a writer for whom the term "multifaceted" could have been invented. Hayward's reliance on Naipaul's own words rather than on literary theories thoroughly grounds the book in Naipaul's very complex world. For literary collections.-Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.