Feder's in-depth knowledge of Naipaul's work is evident from her discussions. She moves fluidly through his many books, carefully documenting how the themes that concern Naipaul appear, reappear, and change over time.
It is hard to be fair to V.S.Naipaul's books: they challenge readers in contentiousness. A neutral or disinterested reading seems pointless. Most critics of Naipaul think they must hand down a political verdict. Lillian Feder never forgets that the novels are works of art or they are nothing. She engages with Naipaul's political essays and examines their relation to the corresponding fictions. Immensely helpful work, this. I hope that readers will learn from her patience and from the quality and force of her intelligence.--Denis Donoghue, New York University
Feder's in-depth knowledge of Naipaul's work is evident from her discussions. She moves fluidly through his many books, carefully documenting how the themes that concern Naipaul appear, reappear, and change over time.--Foreword Reviews
Feder's in-depth knowledge of Naipaul's work is evident from her discussions. She moves fluidly through his many books, carefully documenting how the themes that concern Naipaul appear, reappear, and change over time.
Though he has practiced his craft in many genres--fiction, travel narratives, journalism, memoirs--Naipaul once remarked that he was "really writing one big book." Critic Feder (emerita, English, CUNY) engages in a search for the keys to the meanings in Naipaul's work. She contends that the pervasive theme is Naipaul's "search for truth, an inner narrative of self-creation disclosed in the first or third person." Combining theoretical, biographical, and psychological approaches, Feder performs close critical readings of Naipaul's novels and his nonfiction, contending that he clearly deserves to be recognized as a modern literary master because his works are so complex and ambiguous. Yet Feder's book rests on a simplistic thesis--the search for truth expressed in a particular narrative form--that can easily be applied to any modern writer, if not all writers. Moreover, her prose is uninspiring and her insights unoriginal. Although large academic libraries will want to own this for students writing on Naipaul, it is otherwise not recommended.--Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Raised in Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul has written extensively about the enduring economic, cultural, and psychological effects of colonialism, particularly its assaults on individual identity. This literary biography examines Naipaul's political essays, travel narratives, history, and journalism as well as his works of fiction and describes Naipaul's methods for discovering the truth about himself and the world he explores. Feder is a scholar of English, classics, and comparative literature (emerita, City University of New York). Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
A literary scholar tours the work of one of literature's most famous tourists. Feder (English and Comp. Lit./CUNY) sets out to defend V.S. Naipaul from his critics, specifically those in the third world who claim that the writer's personal neuroses have prompted neo-colonialist works belittling non-western cultures. Moving through Naipaul's autobiographical pieces, travel writing, and fiction, Feder argues that his critics have missed the ambiguities with which he imbues the post-colonial settings, and that the overwhelming impulse behind most of his writing is actually a quest for truth. The truth Naipaul seeks, however, is experiential rather than ideological; he attempts to paint realistic portraits of people he has known or imagined as they struggle against the crashing tides of post-colonial history. Feder is at her best in explicating the structural unity of Naipaul's books and articles. Time after time, she points out, the central character is an outsider in a post-colonial society who searches for truth among disorder, this quest almost inevitably involving a long voyage, usually by car, and an attempt at writing on the hero's part. These plot devices bear obvious similarities to Naipaul's own history as a Trinidadian author of Indian descent who attended Oxford and has traveled widely through the post-colonial world, and Felder does not dispute that Naipaul is investigating his experiences through his characters. But she contends that these investigations are undertaken in the spirit of inquiry, not out of psychological weakness or a slavish devotion to the British Empire. Unfortunately, Feder does not develop this interesting thesis at sufficient length; the vast majority ofhertext is dedicated to book-by-book summaries of the author's work. For that one could simply read Naipaul, whose prose is better. Not likely to convince the holdouts on the Nobel committee.
