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A Way in the World : A Novel

A Way in the World : A Novel

List Price: $14.00
Your Price: $11.20
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Worthwhile and Challenging Book
Review: An excellent book. At times it is difficult but it is not impossible. A series of failed revolutionaries and their follies occupy the mind of a narrator, an aspiring writer seeking his place in the world. Modern day revolutions like socialism come and fail, not very different from the past where the imperial powers vied for power with a host of different racial groups in South America. This is my first book I've read from V. S. Naipaul after hearing that he won the Nobel Prize. Based on this, I'm going to read more.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Intimations of compassion
Review: It has been said (mostly by me) that the achievement of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larking was that they turned self-pity and whingeing into an art form. Almost. The contrast with V.S. Naipaul puts them in their place. His portrait of the post colonial world is black, and it is bitter, but it is made in good faith, it contains a large portion of the truth, and it is depicted with consummate artistry. Starting with his experiences as a very junior clerk in his native Trinidad, Naipaul's narrator notes "The volumes smelled of fish glue. This was what they were bound with; and I suppose the glue was made from a boiling down of fish bones and skin and offal. It was the colour of honey; it dried very hard, and every careless golden drip had the clarity of glass; but it never lost the smell of fish and rotteness." Note the first unappetizing sensation, how the three physical details in the next sentence shift our attention from the first fact, only to be recapitulated in the final word. This is a special, subtle form of writing.

The theme of the novel consists of several portraits of flawed men who lived and experienced Trinidad. There is the promising English travel writer Foster Morris, who ultimately failed to achieve his full potential. There is the radical black revolutionary Lebrun who is highly intelligent and has many acute things to say about the narrarator's writing, yet ends as an apologist for the Soviet Union and for various African tyrannies. There is a long chapter on Sir Walter Raleigh's futile attempt to find El Dorado, with a discussion of the lies and brutalities he committed in a futilte attempt to save his neck from an ungrateful English government. There is an even longer one on General Miranda, who attempted to free Latin America from the Spanish. The pictures of Raleigh and especially Miranda are damning. Miranda promises to free the slaves of Venezuela, at another time promises his English and Franco-Haitian allies he will do nothing. He has traded slaves in the past, his career has been marked with incompetence and venality, and his political program is vague and pompous. It is not suprisingly that when he arrives in Venezuela the priests will successfully rouse the common people against him as an infidel, that Venezuela will collapse into racial and class strife and that Miranda will be captured and die in a Spanish jail. Finally there is the narrator's visit to a dreary one party state, marked with corruption and violence against the East Asian minority, and where an old colleague of the narrator will be murdered by powerful officials for being too effective against bribery. There is an everpresent ugliness and bigotry. Everywhere there is violence and cruelty: the Spanish and the British in Miranda's Trinidad both butcher slave rebels who have their own violent customs. In one African country a child is butchered so that a chief can be washed in its blood. But the crushing of the chiefs by the central government is no force for progress, but merely a newer and even more unpleasant tyranny. Yet in all these pictures there is something more than condemnation. It is not quite compassion, not quite mercy, in the way that Naipaul agrees that there is something more, something worthy in their lives. It appears to be the truth.

Is it? Naipaul's portrait of Lebrun is based, very obviously, on C.L.R. James, the famous author of The Black Jacobins. Yet Lebrun is at times a dishonest apologist for the Soviet Union, while the real James was very famously a Trotskyist sympathizer. The difference is important: it would not be fair to blames American fundamentalists for the Inquisition. In the end of the Lebrun chapter Lebrun is unable to fully recognize his own memories. "For the interviewer or the television producer it was enough, a text for today; not understanding that Lebrun's anguish had begun there, with the old coachman taking him far back, almost to the times of slavery, as to the good times. But perhaps, too, in extreme old age, he had become a child again, looking only for peace." This is very subtle, but it is not as magnaminous as it appears. It is less an act of justice, as an indulgence, to a character whom Naipaul has subtly manipulated for his convenience. It reminds us of the other side of Naipaul; the spiteful comments on E.M. Forster and the ungenerous attitude towards Salman Rushdie, the critic of Indira Gandhi and Evita Peron who praised the Hindu Communalist government of India during a particularly nasty bout of intercommunal rioting, the man who is admired and praised by the Anglo-American right for condemning the Third World, less for its cruelties (so often unavoidable), but for not being English. Is Naipaul really showing sympathy or is he just too infinitely graceful and subtle to reveal his full contempt? Does he fear showing spontaneity, even love, because he thinks it is only really sentimentality? Something is missing.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Intimations of compassion
Review: It has been said (mostly by me) that the achievement of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larking was that they turned self-pity and whingeing into an art form. Almost. The contrast with V.S. Naipaul puts them in their place. His portrait of the post colonial world is black, and it is bitter, but it is made in good faith, it contains a large portion of the truth, and it is depicted with consummate artistry. Starting with his experiences as a very junior clerk in his native Trinidad, Naipaul's narrator notes "The volumes smelled of fish glue. This was what they were bound with; and I suppose the glue was made from a boiling down of fish bones and skin and offal. It was the colour of honey; it dried very hard, and every careless golden drip had the clarity of glass; but it never lost the smell of fish and rotteness." Note the first unappetizing sensation, how the three physical details in the next sentence shift our attention from the first fact, only to be recapitulated in the final word. This is a special, subtle form of writing.

The theme of the novel consists of several portraits of flawed men who lived and experienced Trinidad. There is the promising English travel writer Foster Morris, who ultimately failed to achieve his full potential. There is the radical black revolutionary Lebrun who is highly intelligent and has many acute things to say about the narrarator's writing, yet ends as an apologist for the Soviet Union and for various African tyrannies. There is a long chapter on Sir Walter Raleigh's futile attempt to find El Dorado, with a discussion of the lies and brutalities he committed in a futilte attempt to save his neck from an ungrateful English government. There is an even longer one on General Miranda, who attempted to free Latin America from the Spanish. The pictures of Raleigh and especially Miranda are damning. Miranda promises to free the slaves of Venezuela, at another time promises his English and Franco-Haitian allies he will do nothing. He has traded slaves in the past, his career has been marked with incompetence and venality, and his political program is vague and pompous. It is not suprisingly that when he arrives in Venezuela the priests will successfully rouse the common people against him as an infidel, that Venezuela will collapse into racial and class strife and that Miranda will be captured and die in a Spanish jail. Finally there is the narrator's visit to a dreary one party state, marked with corruption and violence against the East Asian minority, and where an old colleague of the narrator will be murdered by powerful officials for being too effective against bribery. There is an everpresent ugliness and bigotry. Everywhere there is violence and cruelty: the Spanish and the British in Miranda's Trinidad both butcher slave rebels who have their own violent customs. In one African country a child is butchered so that a chief can be washed in its blood. But the crushing of the chiefs by the central government is no force for progress, but merely a newer and even more unpleasant tyranny. Yet in all these pictures there is something more than condemnation. It is not quite compassion, not quite mercy, in the way that Naipaul agrees that there is something more, something worthy in their lives. It appears to be the truth.

Is it? Naipaul's portrait of Lebrun is based, very obviously, on C.L.R. James, the famous author of The Black Jacobins. Yet Lebrun is at times a dishonest apologist for the Soviet Union, while the real James was very famously a Trotskyist sympathizer. The difference is important: it would not be fair to blames American fundamentalists for the Inquisition. In the end of the Lebrun chapter Lebrun is unable to fully recognize his own memories. "For the interviewer or the television producer it was enough, a text for today; not understanding that Lebrun's anguish had begun there, with the old coachman taking him far back, almost to the times of slavery, as to the good times. But perhaps, too, in extreme old age, he had become a child again, looking only for peace." This is very subtle, but it is not as magnaminous as it appears. It is less an act of justice, as an indulgence, to a character whom Naipaul has subtly manipulated for his convenience. It reminds us of the other side of Naipaul; the spiteful comments on E.M. Forster and the ungenerous attitude towards Salman Rushdie, the critic of Indira Gandhi and Evita Peron who praised the Hindu Communalist government of India during a particularly nasty bout of intercommunal rioting, the man who is admired and praised by the Anglo-American right for condemning the Third World, less for its cruelties (so often unavoidable), but for not being English. Is Naipaul really showing sympathy or is he just too infinitely graceful and subtle to reveal his full contempt? Does he fear showing spontaneity, even love, because he thinks it is only really sentimentality? Something is missing.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A roman à clef
Review: My primary interest in this book is the fifth story, "On the Run." This is the fictional rendering of an actual person, viz. CLR James, the Black literary, left-wing politician originally from Trinidad, the home of Naipaul. In the story James is called "Lebrun," and some of the unimportant details have been slightly altered. James, who died in 1989 in his eighties, has recently enjoyed a bit of posthumous lionization at the hands of certain left-wing writers. While Naipaul deals with him with utmost gentleness, there is no exxcaping the fact that James was an inveterate sorehead, a notorious womanizer, an energetic blowhard, a careful organizer of his own coterie in several countries. Naipaul suggests that there may also have been a sinister side to Lebrun/James. He doesn't insist, but the suggestion is there. Let the reader decide !

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Many Stories, Many Themes, One
Review: This book claims to be a novel. I don't know that it is; it is more like an autobiographical essay, filled with character studies that imply more about the author than anything else. Raleigh and Miranda came to South America to conquer, and to find glory. But in Naipaul's fictional rendering, they've come to find themselves, and a certain tenderness, sentimentality, and openness pervades every word they speak. - I suspect Naipaul himself would be both pleased and angry at this development. You can clearly see his own voice, moral reckonings and conscience in their words, but it is said voice that makes these characters alive. Naipaul, in reading about Miranda and Raleigh, had to put himself in their shoes to understand who they were and their motivations truly, and in the process he found himself in their characters. -

There are other, loosely connected stories in this "novel," too. One about a Muslim who dresses up corpses before funerals; one about working in Trinidad's equivalent of the civil service; another about the development of a young novelist; yet another about the mediocrity of an immensely talented, mature novelist, and the simultaneous absurdity and purity of a black revolutionary. - All of these are, of course, connected by an autobiographical thread. -

But despite the existence of this thread, one would make a major mistake if one asked questions like "What is the narrator's persona?" or "How does the narrator change throughout the story(ies)?" - You are, after all, looking through someone else's eyes at the world. That constant looking submerges the self; makes it a mere reporter many times. -

I don't know how realistic that is (even in selflessness, the self quite literally exists). But it is part of this "novel," and it is beautiful to behold.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good Book
Review: This is a good and challenging novel. It is also perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical, and brazenly so. There is no attempt on the part of the narrator (whom Naipaul uses, first to explain how the colonial baggage affects his characters [characters, incidentally, whom you've met in other Naipaul novels], and then to represent the brainchild of a number of "unwritten" stories told in "A Way in the World's" pages) to distance himself from Naipaul's own experiences in Trinidad, England, and then all over the world, as the "voice" of the former colonials. This weight of this book's message comes late, making a challenging read worthwhile.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The work of a Master in his prime - wonderful!
Review: This is an unusual - perhaps even unique - variety of novel, having at first glance no discernible structure and seeming like a series of meditations on the experience of West-Indian colonialism, linked by personal reminiscences of the author. It is only when the book is finished that the masterful integration of the complexities of plot, descriptions and reflections become fully obvious. Much of the work can be seen as an extended series of imagined scenes and dialogues inspired by the dominant themes of the writer's earlier non-fiction work "The Loss of El Dorado", itself a powerful and searing account of the discovery of Trinidad, its capture from the Spaniards by the British, its failed role as a springboard for incitement of revolution on the South American mainland, and its transformation into a slave society. Whereas the earlier work was strictly factual the form of the later novel allows Naipaul to use the full power of his imagination to visualise the motivations of historical players such as Raleigh and Miranda and their reactions to specific situations. There are a host of other characters however, all probably with a basis in actuality, all are realised with the same degree of keen, indeed merciless, perception that characterises Naipaul's fiction at its best. The scenes of action shift rapidly in both time and locale - from the Elizabethan age, on through the turmoil of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, right through the twentieth century to our own day, with Trinidad, Venezuela, London and an unnamed African colony (Uganda?) providing the backdrop. Those who know these societies today will be impressed by the uncanny accuracy with which their very "feel" is portrayed. This is the work of a master in his prime - wonderful!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not a bad book...just sort of 'scattered'
Review: To borrow the authors' own words...this book is a slippery piece of work. You slip about and lose your footing. It's nice and easy and clear and brilliant for many pages...then, you suddenly feel you've not been paying attention. The author would say those periods are precisely the places you (the reader) have to identify as that is where the writer decides to add and hide things. The book is VERY well written. I learned a lot from the historical aspects of the novel. There are four intersecting stories going on in this book and I think four separate EXCELLENT novels would have been a better arrangement. It does assist in telling you that 'I have to discover myself again'. And it profoundly hints that success comes from a little good luck, talent, knowledge and prestige. I also laughed when I read a line in the book: 'You are tormenting yourself needlessly' as that was how I felt at certain moments of reading this novel.


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