An Unfinished Journey (Transaction Large Print Books) [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Shiva Naipaul (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This collection of essays includes a piece on Australia that the author was writing when he died suddenly in 1985, just short of his 40th birthday, as well as an article about his relationship with his older brother, V. S. Naipaul. PW remarked upon the author's "sensitivity and skill."
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 174 pages
• Publisher: Isis Large Print Books (March 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1850892172
• ISBN-13: 978-1850892175
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,399,625 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars How to exist, how to become real - that is the question., December 7, 2008

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Rudolph Ten-pow (New York, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: AN Unfinished Journey (Mass Market Paperback)

Fresh from reading French's gripping and unsparing biography of his brother, Vidiadhar Surujprashad, I recently returned to Shiva's writing intrigued in part by the promise implicit in the essay "My Brother and I" to more fully explore the nature of the relationship (both personal and as writers) between the two brothers. In the event, I was disappointed. The essay adds little to what was gleaned about the relationship from the elder Naipaul's biography, perhaps because there was little to say - the relationship being neither substantial nor sustained. Shiva is known to have chafed at the inevitable comparison with his more famous brother, but that was what had led me somewhat skeptically to read his "Love and Death in a Hot Country" (Guyana) many years ago. As a Guyanese and therefore somewhat more conversant with the situation on the ground, I had been disappointed at the superficial and even somewhat exploitative quality of the book. But, perhaps because of his continued maturity as an observer and chronicler, "An Unfinished Journey" is insightful and spontaneous, where Hot Country had had a more pedestrian and contrived feel to it. In "An Unfinished Journey", his vignette on his conversation with his Sri Lankan traveling companion is both perceptive and memorable and his arrival in Sri Lanka with neither agenda nor contacts is somehow endearing and in sharp contrast with his brother's modus operandi. The question he raises in his essay on Sri Lanka, "How to exist, how to become properly real - that is the question", he did not live long enough to attempt an answer to. Neil Bissoondath, nephew of the two brothers and a noted writer in his own right now living in Canada, was featured in a TV 5 Monde programme a few weeks ago. He spoke with great feeling and in perfect French about his adopted Quebec City. Whatever the quality of Neil's writing (I have not read any of his books), the elder Seepersad Naipaul could sleep peacefully in his grave content that his dream of literary success has been vicariously realized, and then some.