The Writer and the World

Author: V S NaipaulEditor: Pankaj MishraPublisher: Picador IndiaYear: 2002Language: EnglishPages: 524ISBN/UPC (if available): 0330412906 DescriptionDuring forty years of travel, V S Naipaul has created a wide-ranging body of work, an exceptional and sustained meditation on our world. Now, for the first time, his finest longer pieces of reflection and reportage are collected in one volume.With an abiding faith in modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored a variety of societies and peoples through the many-sided prism of his won experience. Whether writing about Indian mutinies and despair, Mobutu’s mad reign in Zaire, the New York mayoral elections, or the enduring tragedy of Argentina, he demonstrates time and again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the many ways in which the world works, of the universal relation of the exploiter to the exploited. And no one has put forth a more consistently eloquent defense of the dignity of the individual an