V.S. Naipaul has claimed that all his work is really one and he has been writing one big book all these years; also, considering the world he has stepped into and the world he has to look at, he cannot be a professional novelist in the old sense. In his early youth Naipaul took up the vocation of a writer as his religion and, since the beginning five decades ago, has drawn on his intensely personal experience of an uprooted person adrift in the world, his experience of the two worlds to none of which he could really belong — an experience that imparts the authentic voice to his works — both non-fiction and fiction — enriched by a distinct autobiographical flavour. Naipaul himself is split into his characters in whom are manifested subtle shades of his emotions and traits. He is ‘accidental man,’ ‘dangling man,’ ‘history man’ and the ‘mimic man’ all rolled into one. Naipaul is also one of Literature’s great travellers, and his absorption into the experience of rootlessness, the alienating effects of colonial past on today’s postcolonial people has taken him to Africa, South America, India and all over the world not in search of roots but in search of rootlessness, and has yielded a rich harvest of travelogues which are about much more than travel. An author of a large number of fictional and non-fictional works, Naipaul continues to surprise, excite, provoke and move readers at every turn of his literary voyage. Naipaul has unseverable emotional bond with India which remains for him an area of pain, ‘an ache for which one has a great tenderness’ yet from which he wishes to separate himself. The world of V.S. Naipaul is the world of two worlds. The present volumes of papers on Naipaul, led by Naipaul’s Nobel lecture, offer illuminating perspectives and interesting explorations into this rich, enigmatic, sad, hilarious, and fascinating world of Naipaul.

Table of Contents:
1. The World, the Text, and the Caribbean Writer: Representation in the Work of V.S. Naipaul –Rafe Dalleo 2. A House for Mr Biswas: A Study in Cultural Predicament –N. Sharada Iyer 3. Search for Identity: Ideology and Social Conflict in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas –Prakash Chandra Pradhan 4. Identity Crisis in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas –Amar Nath Prasad 5. Alienation and Home: A Study of A House for Mr Biswas –Santosh Chakrabarti 6. V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas: An Autobiographical Study –Bhagabat Nayak 7. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas and Mordecai Richler’s Son of a Smaller Hero: A Critique of Paradox of Life –S. Kanakaraj and J. Samuel Kirubahar 8. Shock, Derision and Satire in V.S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness –Sabita Tripathy 9. A Million Mutinies in the Domain of Darkness –Jagdish V. Dave 10. “But why call it a novel?”: Varieties of Transgression in V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival –David Malcolm 11. V.S. Naipaul’s Ironic Visions –Emilienne Baneth-NouailhetAs 12. The Post-Colonial Confusion and V.S. Naipaul –Hiren Gohain 13. Trajectory of Displacement: Expatriate Sensibility of V.S. Naipaul –Nanda Kishore Mishra 14. A Journey of Rejection: V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men –Veena Singh 15. V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life: Memory and the Myth of Origin –Aida Luz Rodríguez Colón 16. V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life: A Critical Study –Alpana Mishra 17. V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life: The Colonial Context and Some Postcolonial Issues –Santwana Haldar 18. Disorientation of Identity in V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life –Bhagabat Nayak 19. Half a Life: A Reading in Sense, Sensibility and Sensuality –Ashwini Kumar Vishnu 20. V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life: A World of Cultural Neurasthenia sans Therapy –Nidhi Tiwari 21. Naipaul as a Short Story Writer –Kamal Mehta 22. A Critical Examination of the Sense of Detachment in the Selected Fictions and Short Fictions of Naipaul –S. Kanakaraj Contributors