Our Universal Civilization Author: [UK] VS Naipaul Publisher: Nanhai Publishing Company Original title: The Writer and the World

Booker Prize and Nobel Prize winner VS Naipaul's career non-fiction masterpieces

📰 He walks and writes all his life, and the whole world is his study.

📰 Single-handedly raised non-fiction writing to the level of the Nobel Prize

📰 Thirty years across four continents, from the Third World to the center of the empire, twenty magical journeys

📰 Dissect the fanaticism of nationalism, burst the bubble of political correctness, and write a prequel to the world torn apart

📰Jointly recommended by The Guardian, The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, etc., with a 4.6-point reputation from US-Asia

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🌴 Leading to a corner you have never reached

Few Nobel Prize winners would actually go to remote areas of Pakistan or Congo to listen to the stories of unknown people. Naipaul did it. - Ian Buruma, former editor of The New York Review of Books

✍ Nobel Prize-level non-fiction writing

Rarely has a writer as gifted as Naipaul devoted himself to nonfiction. He brought to the genre an extraordinary ability to turn lucid thought into art. —Vivian Gornik, renowned author

💡 Use the pen as a blade to challenge the whole world

Naipaul does not speak well of the world, and even speaks ill of it, but the bad things he says are profound, well-known, and have lasting vitality. The entire process of the world seems to be to prove his insight and prophecy. - Zhian

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This book brings together 20 extremely important travel notes and documentary works by the writer VS Naipaul, starting with his return trip to India in 1962 and ending with his investigation of the Latin American revolution in 1991. Naipaul measured the disparity of the world with his footsteps, crossing four continents in thirty years, from the corners of the Third World to the center of imperialism, recording the division and bloodshed of the post-war world, and analyzing the real dilemmas of political systems and ideologies in different countries.

During this lifelong journey and writing, he looked back fondly at his birthplace, Trinidad, a small colonial island with a population of only 550,000; he also returned again and again to India, the hometown of his father's generation, "a place I would think of with great tenderness, but always want to escape from in the end"; he also cast his gaze on the larger world, and like a war correspondent, he broke into the center of the storm - in the dictatorial country of the new king of Congo, searching for the heart of darkness in the jungles and rivers; he was involved in the dirty war in Buenos Aires, and encountered the soul of Argentina between cemeteries and brothels; he showed up at the American election scene, and witnessed how money, power and television murdered intellect and fabricated democracy.

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The essays in this collection are an important part of my life journey. In those days, I often accepted commissions and embarked on travel to write. I had to record all kinds of places, which was perhaps both a challenge and an expansion of my abilities. It was a wonderful experience, and the readers of this book can look at it as a souvenir of that era. -VS Naipaul

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Naipaul's works have a unified narrative sense and uncorrupted insight, which allows us to see the existence of distorted history and inspires us to explore the truth. ——Nobel Prize in Literature Award Speech

Naipaul is a master of English literature. --JM Coetzee, Nobel Prize winner in Literature

Naipaul is a writer with rich life experience, broad vision and hard work. There is a fierceness and deep coldness in his works, which makes people sad and even desperate. He conveys love with hatred and grasps hope with despair. - Mai Jia

I think Naipaul has given me a way of observation, although I haven't learned it either. I especially want to acquire his delicate descriptive ability. - Xu Zhiyuan

Naipaul does not speak well of the world, and even speaks ill of it, but the bad things he says are profound, well-known, and have lasting vitality. The entire process of the world seems to be to prove his insight and prophecy. - Zhian

Naipaul has the highest perceptions, and his style provides the perfect vehicle for expressing these perceptions. -Martin Amis, famous writer

It is hard to imagine a writer who is a more complete exile than Naipaul, who holds within him so many conflicting, vanishing worlds. But what is even more remarkable is that, despite the intense stimulation of his fading glory and achievement, and the pain of his keen sense of deception and tragedy that are an integral part of his background and experience, he still maintains an uncomplaining and optimistic attitude, and a full faith in human endeavor and self-improvement. - Pankaj Mishra, writer, one of the "100 Greatest Thinkers in the World"

Few writers as gifted as Naipaul devote themselves to nonfiction writing. He brings to the genre an extraordinary ability to turn lucid thought into art. He is a writer whose enemy is language: he despises beautiful words as much as he despises mysticism. He believes that if you observe hard, think even harder, and figure out what you are thinking in the simplest and clearest language, you will get a story. I can no longer imagine the world without Naipaul's work. - Vivian Gornik, a well-known feminist writer

Naipaul's world is created by his eyes and ears. He disdains generalizations, and listens to people, not just their opinions but their intonations, their precise choice of words, even their evasiveness. His eyes record everything at once, clothes, gestures, expressions, the physical details that allow him to draw them accurately, like a lepidopterist studying a butterfly. Then his alert, never sentimental brain, suspicious of romantic affectations, filters these detailed observations. Few Nobel Prize winners would actually go to remote areas of Pakistan or Congo just to listen to the stories of unknown people. Naipaul did it. It shows a great humility that he can still see traces of himself in the humblest Indonesian, the most ordinary Pakistani, the poorest African. - Ian Buruma, former editor of The New York Review of Books and professor at Bard College in New York

Naipaul is widely admired for his forthright insights, providing an antidote to the clichés of political correctness. —Commonwealth Literary Journal

In an age of black and white, the complexity of VS Naipaul reminds us that it is wiser to look at things with an uncertain eye. - The Guardian

Only Naipaul could deny so many things and yet make them clear... He always speaks directly and gets to the point - his works are full of reckless arrogance and incisive insights. - San Francisco Chronicle

These articles fully demonstrate that he is a true world citizen and that he deserves the Nobel Prize. - Scotland on Sunday

Insightful, inspiring, provocative—Naipaul successfully and richly demonstrates how writers engage with and explore the world. —San Diego Union-Tribune

The most outstanding writer in English today, he looks into the mad eyes of history without blinking. - The Boston Globe

Smart yet caustic, insightful yet outspoken, Naipaul shows the real world. - The Standard

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