Description

Created in Trinidad of Indian ancestry, a citizen of England for his whole adult life, and an enormous tourist, Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul has often confronted the problems of “fitting one civilisation to another.” Below, in his first book of non-fiction since 2003, he offers us an elegant, honest, wide ranging story that goes into this occasionally accidental procedure for innovative and rational assimilation.He covers the authors he read in early stages: Derek Walcott, Gustave Flaubert and their own father among them. He describes how Anthony Powell and Francis Wyndham affected his first encounters with literary tradition.