Awards
Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature
Synopses & Reviews
On the basis of his seven-month journey across the Asian continent. V.S. Naipaul here explores the life, the culture and the current ferment inside four nations of Islam: Iran, where the hysteria and rage of revolution continues; Pakistan, trageically underdeveloped thirty-two years after its founding as a homeland for the Muslims of India; Malaysia, governed by Muslims but economically dominated by the Chinese who constitute half of its national roots, confused by the rule of four regimes (two foreign) in less than forty years. Naipaul depicts an Islamic world at odds with the modern world, fueled only by an implacable determination to believe.
Review
"A brilliant report...a book of scathing inquiry and judgment, whose tragic power is being continually reinforced by current events." Newsweek
Review
"Brilliant, thoughtful and persuasive." Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"A timely and profound inquiry: yet it is also a lively travel account, full of quick vignettes, word sketches an dpieces of conversation a pleasure to read." The Wall Street Journal
Review
"The eye is as sharp and the ear as acute as ever; but now the heart has acquired a tenderness that brings this work closer to us than any of Naipaul's others, admirable as they were. He began this journey as our greatest journalist, and he has returned from it a grander personage by far." Newsday
Review
"Mr. Naipaul is a remarkable diagnostician...an admirable, thinking traveller...a born narrator in the small or large scene. Every place and person and mind comes to life." The New Yorker
Synopsis
From the Nobel Prize-winning author--"the most notable work on contemporary Islam to have appeared in a very long time" (The New Republic).
Naipaul's controversial account of his travels through the Islamic world is "a brilliant report.... A book of scathing inquiry and judgment, whose tragic power is being continually reinforced by current events" (Newsweek).
Synopsis
The Nobel Prize-winning author gives us - on the basis of his own intensive seventeen month journey across the Asian continent - an unprecedented revelation of the Islamic world. - "A brilliant report.... A book of scathing inquiry and judgment, whose tragic power is being continually reinforced by current events" (Newsweek). With all the narrative power and intellectual authority that have distinguished his earlier books and won him international acclaim ("There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him" - Irving Howe, The New York Times Book Review), Naipaul explores the life, the culture, the ferment inside the nations of Islam - in a book that combines the fascinations of the great works of travel literature with the insights of a uniquely sharp, original, and idiosyncratic political mind.
He takes us into four countries in the throes of "Islamization" - countries that, in their ardor to build new societies based entirely on the fundamental laws of Islam, have violently rejected the "materialism" of the technologically advanced nations that have long supported them. He brings us close to the people of Islam - how they live and work, the role of faith in their lives, how they see their place in the modern world.
Synopsis
Naipaul's controversial account of his travels through the Islamic world was hailed by The New Republic as "the most notable work on contemporary Islam to have appeared in a very long time."
About the Author
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990. He lives in Wiltshire, England.