A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [271]
Her sisters did not fail Shama. They all came. For them it was an occasion of reunion, no longer so frequent, for they had all moved to their own houses, some in the town, some in the country.
Downstairs the doors of the house were open. The door that couldn’t open had been made to, and its hinges dislocated. The furniture was pushed to the walls. All that day and evening well-dressed mourners, men, women and children, passed through the house. The polished floor became scratched and dusty; the staircase shivered continually; the top floor resounded with the steady shuffle. And the house did not fall.
The cremation, one of the few permitted by the Health Department, was conducted on the banks of a muddy stream and attracted spectators of various races. Afterwards the sisters returned to their respective homes and Shama and the children went back in the Prefect to the empty house.
ALSO BY V. S. NAIPAUL
“For sheer abundance of talent, there can
hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V. S. Naipaul.”
—The New York Times Book Review
A BEND IN THE RIVER
In this novel V. S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man—an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72202-5
THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL
The story of a writer’s singular journey—from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another—this is perhaps Naipaul’s most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.
Fiction/Literature/0-394-75760-2
GUERRILLAS
Set on a troubled Caribbean island—where Asians, Africans, Americans, and former British colonials coexist in a state of suppressed hysteria—Guerrillas is a novel of colonialism and revolution. A white man arrives with his mistress, an Englishwoman inflamed by fantasies of native power and sexuality, unaware of the consequences of her actions. Together with a mulatto leader of the “revolution,” they act out a gripping drama of death, sexual violence, and spiritual impotence.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73174-1
IN A FREE STATE
This grouping of two short stories and a short novel within a prologue and an epilogue from Naipaul’s travel journals is, as Nadine Gordimer wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “not a collection of occasional pieces but an entity … part of the achievement that … will show [Naipaul] to have been a great writer.” Winner of the Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary award, it is held together by its pervading concern with the themes of exile, freedom, and prejudice.
Fiction/Literature/0-394-72205-1
A WAY IN THE WORLD
Spanning continents and centuries, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh fruitlessly seeking El Dorado in the New World; the nineteenth-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who in his quest to liberate South America becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded—and eventually martyred—in East Africa.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-76166-7
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