The World is what it is - The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul

Zusatztext 73557018 Informationen zum Autor Patrick French was born in England in 1966 and studied literature at Edinburgh University. He is the author of Younghusband ; Liberty or Death ; Tibet, Tibet ; and The World Is What It Is , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hawthornden Prize. French is the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award. He died in 2023. Klappentext French offers the first authoritative biography of V.S. Naipaul! the controversial Nobel laureate! whose only stated ambition was greatness as a writer! in pursuit of which nothing else was sacred. The New WorldThe islands of the Caribbean dot and dash their way through the sea, linking different worlds. Central America joins the southern and northern hemispheres, taking you up through Colombia, Panama and Nicaragua by the land route until you reach Mexico, or down through the shallows of the Atlantic from Florida to the Bahamas, skirting Cuba and Jamaica, passing Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, until you find yourself in the sprayed arc of islands known as the Lesser Antilles, some no more than a few miles across: Anguilla, Sint Maarten, Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia, Martinique, Grenada. At the tip of the chain lies a larger island which, beneath the sea or geologically, is part of the South American mainland. Almost square, with a low promontory at its south-western corner pointing to Venezuela, this is Trinidad.In the summer of 1498, three ships approached the shores of the island. The men on board were exhausted and burned by the sun, surviving off raisins, salt pork and sea biscuits, their supply of water running low. They were led by a white-haired voyager in his forties named Christoforo Colombo, known also as Christóbal Colón or Christopher Columbus. He was ill, his body inflamed and his eyes bleeding. It was Columbus’s third voyage in search of Asia, and the one on which his future depended. A few months earlier, Vasco da Gama had reached Calicut, opening Europe’s sea route to India. Renowned for his acute sense of smell, Columbus would have drunk in the lush, flowering vegetation of the island with its easy, humid, tropical climate, home to rainforests of bamboo and hardwood, flashing birds like the silver-beaked tanager, rivers, waterfalls and an array of caymans, snakes and beasts such as the nine-banded armadillo. There were no cocoa estates, no sugar-cane plantations, no breadfruit trees; Captain Bligh had yet to bring them from Tahiti. The only inhabitants were families of Amerindians who lived by farming and fishing, having paddled across the sea from the Orinoco river delta many centuries before.Seeing three ranges of mountains running across the island, Columbus named it La Isla de la Trinidad after the Holy Trinity, in the Christian way. Later that day his sailors landed on the south coast to take on fresh water—the moment of first contact. Over the following weeks they navigated neighbouring waters, and became the first Europeans to see the mainland of South America, the fresh green breast of the New World. Columbus suspected as he charted the wide mouth of the Orinoco river that he was on the edge of a continent rather than another island. With his health failing, he ordered his ships to sail north through the stretch of water between Trinidad and the mainland—the Gulf of Paria—until they reached the island of Margarita.The outbreak of the sixteenth century brought adventurers to the island of Trinidad, who enslaved the indigenous Amerindians and sent them to work in Spanish colonies overseas. The old world disappeared: land was stolen, new settlements were made. The English, Dutch, French and Spanish all battled and schemed for supremacy in the islands of the West Indies. Using the legal formalities of the time, local chiefs ...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Patrick French
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 03.11.2009
• EAN: 9781400079803
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7980-3
• Pagine: 592
• Dimensioni: 155 mm x 235 mm x 32 mm
• Categorie: Narrativa > Romanzi > Epistole, diari; Saggistica > Filosofia, religione > Biografie, autobiografie