A Writer''s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling
English
By (author): V. S. Naipaul
Part meditation, part remembrance, A Writers People by V. S. Naipaul is a privileged insight, full of gentleness, humour and feeling, into the mind of one of our greatest writers.
For the serious traveller, one who is fully engaged with the world, there can be no single view. Our authors purpose, then, is not literary criticism or biography, but only to set out the writing and ways of seeing to which he was exposed. So here is colonial Trinidad (the early Derek Walcott and Naipauls own father); the culture of school (Flaubert and the classical world); England, where with the help of friends the writer seeks to make his way; and, inevitably for a colonial Indian, there is India, to be approached through the residue of Indian culture and the scattered memories of nineteenth-century immigrants, leading to a special understanding of Mahatma Gandhi.