Literary Occasions: Essays [Hardcover]

V.S. Naipaul (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 2003

From a master of the English language–winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature–a collection of essays about reading, writing, and identity.

In these eleven pieces–brought together for the first time–Naipaul charts more than half a century of personal inquiry into the mysteries of written expression and of fiction in particular. Here are his boyhood experiences of reading books and his first youthful efforts at writing them; the early glimmers and the evolution of ideas about the proper relation of particular literary forms to particular cultures and identities. Here, too, is Naipaul’s famous comment on his putative literary forebear Conrad, and a less familiar but no less intriguing preface to the only book Naipaul’s father ever published. Finally, in his celebrated Nobel Lecture, “Two Worlds,” Naipaul reflects on the full scope of his career, rounding off the volume as an intellectual autobiography. Sustained by extraordinary powers of expression and thought, Literary Occasions is a stirring contribution to the fading art of the critic, and a revelation as well of a life in letters, in its many exemplary instances.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

One imagines many readers are still absorbing The Writer and the World, Naipaul's magisterial collection of deeply opinionated global political reports and cultural meditations that was released last August, covering the last four decades of the Nobel laureate's nonfiction work. The paperback of Writer pubs a month before this book, which collects Naipaul's literary prose, a mixed bag including everything from reminiscences of his laconic childhood approach toward writing to his 1983 foreword to his celebrated 1961 novel, A House for Mr. Biswas. Indeed, the most substantial piece here, "Prologue to an Autobiography," is also 20 years old and also previously published, as are the other 10 entries here. All touch on Naipaul's Trinidadian upbringing and coming-of-age or his adult writing life in one way or another; together, they form a literary autobiography that has its apotheosis in the most recent piece, Naipaul's 2001 Nobel lecture, "Two Worlds," which notes, "When I began I had no idea of the way ahead. I wished only to do a book." He has done many; this book is for readers interested in their sources.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

"I have trusted to intuition," Naipaul confides in "Two Worlds," his elegant and poignant 2001 Nobel Prize lecture, one jewel among many in this engrossing collection of four decades' worth of literary and autobiographical essays, a companion volume to The Writer and the World [BKL My 1 02]. Naipaul has also obeyed his unceasing need to understand life as lived outside the confines of the immigrant Indian community in the village of Chaguanas, Trinidad, in which he grew up. His sharp reminiscences reveal the source of his unflinching, often controversial analyses of cultural assumptions, the politics of prejudice, and the unreliability of history as he considers the confounding disconnection between his early desire to be a writer and his inability to lose himself in books because what he read had so little to do with his life. In writing about his painful struggle to find his writing voice, Oxford-educated Naipaul considers the legacy of imperialism and relates the incredibly moving story of his father, a self-taught writer. Naipaul's vigorous interpretations of Conrad, Dickens, and R. K. Narayan, and candid self-disclosure cogently explicate the mysterious call to write and celebrate the radiance literature brings to lives otherwise relegated to the shadows. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (August 12, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375415173
• ISBN-13: 978-0375415173
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,936,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Inside the Outsider, December 30, 2003

By 

J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Literary Occasions: Essays (Hardcover)

This collection brings together mostly previously published essays by V. S. Naipaul (b. 1932), surely one of the greatest writers living amongst us. The only previously unpublished essay is the lecture he gave when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Because the essays are generally autobiographical and/or about literary topics, there is a good bit of repetition. His story of growing up in Trididad, member of an emigrant East Indian family, son of a newspaper journalist, winner of a government grant to study at Oxford is well known to anyone who has read much of his work. Still, he brings a clarity and ease in his writing that makes it a delight to read.

The simplicity and rightness of his prose is all the more obvious after one reads the book's introduction in the clotted style of its editor, Pankaj Mishra. Immediately following that introduction is the invaluable 'Reading and Writing, a Personal Account,' previously published as a 60-page book. It is an invaluable source of insights about how a writer gets his start by reading and how he discovers his 'subject.' 'In my fantasy of being a writer there had been no idea how I might actually go about writing a book.' He took heart from the career of Joseph Conrad, which didn't begin until his late thirties. And then, suddenly one day while sitting in a BBC freelancer's office a single sentence describing a scene on his childhood street in Port of Spain popped into his head. He typed it out and it led to the composition of his first short story. And he never looked back.

The other longish piece here is 'Prologue to an Autobiography.' In it he describes incidents from his childhood--the extended Trinidad Indian family of which he was a part, the struggle of his father to be a writer. Then follows a lovely and loving preface to the edition of his father's only book, 'The Adventures of Gurudeva.'

Throughout these essays the theme of Naipaul's outsider status in the Western world (and in India, for that matter) is examined from different angles. He does this partly by examining several autobiographies by Indian writers, including that by Gandhi. He goes on to say--and this is a valuable tip for anyone interested in Indian writers trying to make sense of their place in the wider world--'[Nirad] Chaudhuri's "Autobiography" may be the one great book to have come out of the Indo-English encounter.'

There is a meditation on the art of Conrad; understandably Naipaul senses a kinship with that peripatetic non-native English writer. He goes to the heart of Conrad's style when he says 'the Conrad novel was like a simple film with an elaborate commentary.' The same could be said, I suspect, of Naipaul's own novels: think of 'A House for Mr. Biswas,' for example.

The Nobel Lecture does not plow new ground. It is a summation of his two-worlds experience and neatly done.

This is not a necessary book except for the Naipaul completist, I suspect. But it is a fascinating experience to have his collected essays on the experience of the outsider.

Scott Morrison

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I am the sum of my books, January 25, 2010

By 

Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Literary Occasions: Essays (Paperback)

In these sometimes highly emotional reflections on his roots (India, Trinidad), his family and his encounters with art (writers, movies), V.S. Naipaul unveils the greatest miracle in his life.

Roots
When he visited India for the first time, he saw `dereliction, so many layers of wretchedness. I felt I was in a continent where a mysterious calamity had occurred.'
The Indian colony in Trinidad was a `world of caste and blood'. His clan was a totalitarian organization ruled by a closed circle at the top with an ethos of feuds.

Family (father)
His father gave him the fear of extinction which could only be combated by the exercise of a vocation. His father worshipped writing and writers. For him, the vocation of the writer was the noblest in the world.

Movies
`Without Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s I would have been spiritually quite destitute.'

Literary encounters (most importantly J. Conrad)
Marcel Proust was a writer who trusted his intuition and waited for luck. He stressed the chasm between a writer as a writer ('the mystery of writing') and the writer as a social being.
Nirad Chaudhuri exposed the ignoble privacy of Indian social organizations, the Indian habit of exclusion, denial and non-seeing.
Rudyard Kipling, a club writer, fixed for all time that moment of British India.
Joseph Conrad didn't seek to disclose, only to explain. He maintained a scrupulous fidelity to the truth of his own sensations. His most crucial stance was that the novel should not be an `instructive, unreasoned outpouring of the writer's own emotions, but should produce certain definite effects upon the emotions of its readers.'

Miracle
`The greatest miracle for me was getting started. I feel - and the anxiety is still vivid to me - that I might easily have failed before I began.'

This deep delving book is a must read for all lovers of world literature and of V.S. Naipaul in particular.