I USED TO have a fanciful picture of the ceremonial return of Blair’s body to Trinidad: the aeroplane was at the airport, and the big casket was being shouldered down the steps by grave men in dark suits, four men or perhaps six. I knew the picture was fanciful, but its stateliness seemed correct for the occasion, until I began to question it. To take a casket of that size down the steps would have been impossible for four men or six men. Where would the casket have been in the aeroplane? It would have had to be battened down to the floor in some way. A number of seats would have had to be taken out; that would have meant that a plane had been chartered. That hadn’t happened, so that picture of the casket and the steps and the men in dark suits had to be set aside. The truth would have been simpler. The body would have been in a box, and it would have been placed in a refrigerated part of the aircraft’s hold. The body would have been embalmed in Africa; that meant the internal organs would have been removed. At the airport in Trinidad the flaps of the hold would have opened, and when the time came the box would have been transferred to a low trailer, and perhaps in some way hidden or covered. There would have been formalities. Would the embalmed body in its box then have been transferred to a hearse? The hearse didn’t seem right. I made enquiries. I was told that the box would have been taken away in an ambulance to Port of Spain, and then the shell of the man would have been laid out in Parry’s chapel of rest.
December 1991–October 1993
ALSO BY
V. S. NAIPAUL
Fiction
“For sheer abundance of talent, there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V. S. Naipaul.”
—The New York Times Book Review
A Bend in the River
This brilliant novel tells the story of one man—an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72202-5
The Enigma of Arrival
The story of a writer’s singular journey—from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England and from one state of mind to the discovery of another.
Fiction/0394-75760-2
Guerrillas
Set on a troubled Caribbean island—where Asians, Africans, Americans, and former British colonials coexist in a state of suppressed hysteria—Guerrillas is a novel of exile, displacement, and the pain and cruelty of colonialism.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73174-1
Nonfiction
A Turn in the South
V. S. Naipaul’s first book about the United States is a revealing, disturbing, elegiac meditation on the American South—from Atlanta to Charleston, Tallahassee to Tuskegee, Nashville to Chapel Hill.
Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-72488-5
Among the Believers
An Islamic Journey
On the basis of his seven-month journey across the Asian continent, V. S. Naipaul explores the life, the culture, and the current ferment inside four nations of Islam: Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Current Events/0-394-71195-5
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order: 1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
POSSESSION
by A. S. Byatt
An intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.
“Gorgeously written … a tour de force.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Winner of the Booker Prize
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73590-9
THE STRANGER
by Albert Camus
Through the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder, Camus explores what he termed “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72020-0
INVISIBLE MAN
by Ralph Ellison
This searing record of a black man’s journey through contemporary America reveals, in Ralph Ellison’s words, “the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class, color and region.”
“The greatest American novel in the second half of the twentieth century … the classic representation of American black experience.”
—R.W. B. Lewis
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72313-7
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
by Kazuo Ishiguro
“One of the best books of the year.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73172-5
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES
by Cormac McCarthy
At sixteen, John Grady Cole finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
“A book of remarkable beauty and strength, the work of a master in perfect command of his medium.”
—Washington Post Book World
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74439-8
BUDDENBROOKS
THE DECLINE OF A FAMILY
by Thomas Mann
Translated by John E. Woods
This masterpiece is an utterly absorbing chronicle of four generations of a German mercantile family. As Thomas Mann charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline, he creates a world of exuberant vitality and almost Rabelaisian earthiness.
“Wonderfully fresh and elegant … bound to become the definitive English version.”
—Los Angeles Times
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75260-9
LOLITA
by Vladimir Nabokov
The famous and controversial novel that tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
“The only convincing love story of our century.”
—Vanity Fair
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72316-1
THE ENGLISH PATIENT
by Michael Ondaatje
During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion, recollection and observation is woven.
“It seduces and beguiles us with its many-layered mysteries, its brilliantly taut and lyrical prose, its tender regard for its characters.”
—Newsday
Winner of the Booker Prize
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74520-3
OPERATION SHYLOCK
by Philip Roth
In this tour de force of fact and fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse, and it is up to Roth to stop him—even if that means impersonating his impersonator.
“A diabolically clever, engaging work … the result is a kind of dizzying exhilaration.”
—Boston Globe
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75029-0
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