{"product_id":"a-way-in-the-world-9780679761662","title":"A Way in the World","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe Nobel Prize-winning author--and \"one of literature's great travelers\" (\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e)--spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"Dickensian ... a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work.\"--\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum--that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp--which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in \u003ci\u003eThe Enigma of Arrival\u003c\/i\u003e, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention.\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eIt is the story of a writer's lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance -- language, character, family history -- and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: \"things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.\" What he writes -- and what his release of memory enables us to see -- is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh's final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda's disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator's own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates to England, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling.\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eV.S. NAIPAUL was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eHis novels include \u003ci\u003eA House for Mr Biswas\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Mimic Men\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eGuerrillas\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eA Bend in the River\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Enigma of Arrival\u003c\/i\u003e. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for \u003ci\u003eIn a Free State\u003c\/i\u003e. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include \u003ci\u003eAmong the Believers\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBeyond Belief\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Masque of Africa\u003c\/i\u003e, and a trio of books about India: \u003ci\u003eAn Area of Darkness\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eIndia: A Wounded Civilization\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eIndia: A Million Mutinies Now\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn 1990, V.S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He died in 2018.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50844907372818,"sku":"9780679761662","price":13.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_6b55d807-00a8-4eff-859a-7e096d8eb020.jpg?v=1737336303","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/a-way-in-the-world-9780679761662","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}