A Writer's People

Praise

“Bracing, surprising…. A meditation on art and life.”
—The New York Review of Books

“True to Naipaul’s ability to engender the provocative out of the provoking…. A visionary vantage over the wider human condition.”
—The Boston Globe

“Looking hard at cruelty, taking nothing for granted, are the hallmarks of Naipaul’s stance. His writing gleams with brilliance . . . It’s impossible not to admire the prose.”
—The Seattle Times

“A bracing, erudite ride . . . Wonderfully written . . . One may question Naipaul’s premise, but it in no way negates that he is a very great writer . . . What remains impressive is Naipaul’s sense of wonder at the worlds he has discovered.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Rich with surprise and erudition, informed by an alchemist’s imagination . . . Naipaul explores [ways of looking] sometimes through the experiences of the notable (Gandhi), sometimes through the eyes of the nearly anonymous (an upholsterer), sometimes through those tiny moments of immense significance that have long been a feature of Naipaul’s work.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Praise from the UK:

“This is an important coda, on a lifetime of ‘seeing’ . . . For Naipaul, ‘seeing’ with clarity is all-important to both constantly remaking the world through literature and to fashioning a history for oneself . . . Brilliant.”
—Amit Chaudhuri, The Guardian

“Naipaul’s latest collection of essays, A Writer’s People, is essential reading for those who admire his work and want to understand it further. But there is much there for any enquiring mind, as it offers the insights and observations on literature, history and cultural sensibility of an honest and truly global thinker.”
—The Evening Standard

“Many sides of the complicated Naipaul personality are on show as he sets them out . . . Naipaul is at his best here when teasing out the ironies and complexities of cultural exchange in the persons of figures with whom he can identify.”
—Sunday Telegraph

“It is Naipaul’s ‘way of looking and feeling’ that has made his work so controversial . . . But this is a brilliant work from a man who more than anybody else embodies what it means to be a writer . . . As it turns out, Naipaul’s reading has been as wide and deep as his peregrinations through the decolonised world . . . As ever, his sentences are tightly coiled and muscular; they embody the very qualities they praise . . . Revelatory.”
—The Observer