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A companion volume to THE WRITER AND THE WORLD, LITERARY OCCASIONS collects ten essays by Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul. The book is divided into two major sections that are bookended by a not so very enlightening prologue by editor Pankaj Mishra and Naipaul's Nobel Lecture from 2001. The first section is made up of essays in which Naipaul examines his own writing career and the life events that have influenced it. The essays in the second section examine the writing of others including Nirad Chaudhuri, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad.
While Naipaul is a perceptive reader with a sharp critical eye, unless one has a particular interest in the writers he considers in the essays found in the second part of LITERARY OCCASIONS, the pieces may not be particularly gripping. However, the essays in the first portion of the collection should be of interest to any Naipaul fan, as well as to those with a general interest in where writers find inspiration.
Naipaul, best known for his early novel A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS, was born in 1932 in Trinidad. His family was part of an Indian community on the small Caribbean island that was a part of the British Empire. For Naipaul, his life as an Indian far from India and subject to British rule in either place seemed to hinder him as a writer.
"I might adapt Dickens to Trinidad; but it seemed impossible that the life I knew in Trinidad could ever be turned into a book," he wrote in a 1964 essay titled "Jasmine." "If landscapes do not start to be real until they have been interpreted by an artist, so, until they have been written about, societies appear to be without shape and embarrassing. But no writer, however individual his vision, could be separated from this society."
Naipaul details his efforts to create a literature for a society that had no existing literary tradition to build upon. He also explores his father's life as a newspaper reporter working for a maverick editor and how his father's work as a writer sparked his desire to become an author. At times the essays are repetitive, but taken together they create a compelling portrait of a major author at work and the sources of that work. Best read by those familiar with Naipaul's fiction, LITERARY OCCASIONS provides a unique window into the interior life at the heart of its creation.
--- Reviewed by Rob Cline (Rob__Cline@hotmail.com)
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