V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad

V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad adopts an original approach to reclaim Naipaul for his birthplace, through assiduously documenting how Naipaul's growing global fame was perceived, and received, in his own native backyard. As a person of Indian origin herself long resident in Trinidad, Nivedita Misra offers here a unique double perspective. This is an invaluable work.-Harish Trivedi, Department of English, Delhi University, India. A provocative take on Naipaul's controversial Trinidad connection and its shaping influence on his life, work and critical reception. Nivedita Misra's incisive study resituates Naipaul's writings as a lifelong struggle to negotiate his fraught relationship with Trinidad, a place he could neither fully belong to nor quite abandon.-Radha Chakravarty, writer, critic and translator, was Professor of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies at Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi, India. Dr Misra frees Naipaul from the grasp of globalism, post-colonialism and other identifications as seen in the non-Trinidadian responses to his work. She pursues him doggedly throughout his career, as a Trinidadian to the bone, as obsessed with the island and its people as they are with him.-Kenneth Ramchand, Professor of West Indian Literature Emeritus, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. In this interesting book, Misra makes a convincing case that V. S. Naipaul was 'typically Trinidadian' in his published works and in the persona that he constructed over the decades of his writing life. She shows how Trinidad's unique society, and Naipaul's birth family, upbringing and youth, shaped all his work, not only the eight novels and several non-fiction books set in or about Trinidad but also the books on the Islamic world, Africa and England. - Bridget Brereton, Emerita Professor of History, The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago.