Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (84 page)

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AMONG THE BELIEVERS

On the basis of his seven-month journey across the Asian continent, V. S. Naipaul explores the life, the culture, and the ongoing ferment inside four nations of Islam: Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In this brilliant account, Naipaul depicts an Islamic world at odds with the contemporary world and fueled by an implacable determination to believe.

Current Affairs

AN AREA OF DARKNESS

A classic of modern travel writing,
An Area of Darkness
is V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir and a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross section of humanity and develops strikingly original and passionate responses to the subcontinent.

Travel

A BEND IN THE RIVER

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

BETWEEN FATHER AND SON

In 1950, V. S. Naipaul, aged seventeen, took a two-week journey by steamer and arrived in Oxford, England, a world utterly removed from the one he had longed to escape and to which he would never really return. This collection of letters between a sacrificing father and his determined son gives us an intimate view of Naipaul’s formative years and bears witness to the flowering of a literary genius.

Biography

BEYOND BELIEF

Fourteen years after the publication of his landmark travel narrative
Among the Believers
, V. S. Naipaul returned to the four non-Arab Islamic countries he reported on so vividly at the time of Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumph in Iran.
Beyond Belief
is the result of his five-month journey through Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. In extended conversations with a vast number of people, including a rare survivor of the martyr brigades of the Iran-Iraq war and an intellectual training as a Marxist guerrilla, Naipaul deliberately effaces himself to let the voices of his subjects come through.

Religion/Islam

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 V. S. Naipaul’s most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.

Fiction/Literature

GUERRILLAS

On a troubled Caribbean island—where Asians, Africans, Americans, and former British colonials coexist in a state of suppressed hysteria—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 young mulatto leader of the “Revolution,” they act out a gripping drama of death, sexual violence, and political and spiritual impotence that illuminates the ravages of history on individual lives.

Fiction/Literature

HALF A LIFE

Half a Life
is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret. As an adult, Willie’s flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he tries to contrive a new identity. His struggle to defeat self-doubt and become a writer bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued only by the love of a good woman.

Fiction/Literature

A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS

Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning of his father, Mr. Mohun Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous and endless effort to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own.

Fiction/Literature

IN A FREE STATE

It begins as a simple car trip through Africa. Two English people—Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious “compound wife”—are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin’s Uganda. And the farther V. S. Naipaul’s protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.

Fiction/Literature

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