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Beyond Belief (Paperback)

by V.S. Naipaul (Author) "THIS IS a book about people ..." (more)
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 448 pages
  • Publisher: Abacus; New edition edition (3 Jun 1999)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0349110107
  • ISBN-13: 978-0349110103
  • Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 12.8 x 3.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 243,094 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

With the publication of Paul Theroux's devastating memoir of his broken friendship with V.S. Naipaul, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Naipaul's reputation has been seriously revised in recent years. His early, lyrical novels like A House for Mr. Biswas quickly gave way to a darker, increasingly pessimistic and conservative vision of postcolonial chaos and cultural dislocation, reflected in novels like Guerillas and Naipaul's early travel books, such as India: A Wounded Civilisation.

One of the problems with dismissing Naipaul as a patrician cultural mandarin is that he tends to tussle with uncomfortable issues which lesser writers either avoid or romanticise. It is this desire to confront painful questions about religion, belief and belonging which characterises Naipaul's travel writing, and was a particular feature of his highly acclaimed study Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981), which chronicled his travels and observations through Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples should be read as a sequel to Among the Believers, as it relates the story of Naipaul's five-month journey to the countries he visited, and often the people he interviewed, nearly 20 years earlier. Beyond Belief is a fascinating, unrelenting story of Naipaul's travels through countries which have been subject to what Naipaul calls Islamic "conversion", and the people he encounters and their complex, problematic relations with their faith. Written with Naipaul's usual precision and elegance, Beyond Belief is a controversial and uncompromising read, which has been angrily denounced by the Muslim community. However, it is an excellent antidote to so much current travel writing which uncritically reproduces myths of the exotic orient, and should be read by anyone who wants to begin to travel throughout the non-Arabic Muslim world. --Jerry Brotton



Review

'He remains our most exhilarating explorer, with a corpus of travel writing which now surpasses that of D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene' MARTIN AMIS 'One of the greatest living writers in the English language' ELIZABETH HARDWICK 'Naipaul writes at his precise, observational best ... brilliant' OBSERVER 'Jewel-like individual profiles are set in a filigree-work of acute physical, cultural, historical and psychological detail' FINANCIAL TIMES 'With the publication of Paul Theroux's devastating memoir of his broken friendship with V.S. Naipaul, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Naipaul's reputation has been seriously revised in recent years. His early, lyrical novels like A House for Mr. Biswas quickly gave way to a darker, increasingly pessimistic and conservative vision of postcolonial chaos and cultural dislocation, reflected in novels like Guerillas and Naipaul's early travel books, such as India: A Wounded Civilisation. One of the problems with dismissing Naipaul as a patrician cultural mandarin is that he tends to tussle with uncomfortable issues which lesser writers either avoid or romanticise. It is this desire to confront painful questions about religion, belief and belonging which characterises Naipaul's travel writing, and was a particular feature of his highly acclaimed study Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981), which chronicled his travels and observations through Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples should be read as a sequel to Among the Believers, as it relates the story of Naipaul's five-month journey to the countries he visited, and often the people he interviewed, nearly 20 years earlier. Beyond Belief is a fascinating, unrelenting story of Naipaul's travels through countries which have been subject to what Naipaul calls Islamic "conversion", and the people he encounters and their complex, problematic relations with their faith. Written with Naipaul's usual precision and elegance, Beyond Belief is a controversial and uncompromising read, which has been angrily denounced by the Muslim community. However, it is an excellent antidote to so much current travel writing which uncritically reproduces myths of the exotic orient, and should be read by anyone who wants to begin to travel throughout the non-Arabic Muslim world.' - Jerry Brotton, AMAZON.CO.UK REVIEW
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Still as honest and insightful as ever, 2 Oct 2001
By A Customer
...I do not think that there is any sign of declining powers in Naipaul's most recent travel book. He continues to focus on the key intellectual and social dilemmas of the societies he visits, and successfully draws out people who are at the heart of these confusions. I kmow that it is unfashionable to expose the weaknesses of non-Western societies to public view, but Naipaul's message has always been that it is the ordinary people of these countries who suffer from the evasion of harsh truths. They are just as entitled to opportunities for educational advancement, freedom of expression and the like as we are in the West.

As for Naipaul's personal mindset, he does not approach the Islamic countries as a lapsed Brahmin, but as a rather patrician Westerner. I cannot think of another travel writer who is more perceptive about different types of religious experience while being seduced by none

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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Death of the Intellect, 1 April 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Beyond Belief (Hardcover)
Naipaul is arguably the greatest novelist writing in English today and his mastery of style and composition is no less marked in his non-fiction works. This present volume must rank as one of the best of the latter and reading it sends one back to the earlier work that inspired it, "Among the Believers", in which he detailed a similar journey in 1979. In some cases he even describes meetings with the same people as previously. The changes in the two decades since have seldom been for the better, to the extent to which the alternative title of the present book might well be "The Death of the Intellect". Naipaul deploys his brilliant powers of observation and description to the full in bringing to life the experiences of individuals from a wide variety of social classes and ethnic backgrounds, yet all trapped within a constricting web of dogma. The overall effect is depressing in the extreme as one encounters one life after another stunted by inability to reconcile religious beliefs with the realities of scientific discoveries, technological progress and human potential. It is Naipaul's particular genius to give the reader the very feel of the environments he portrayed, often by no more than mention of a few significant, though apparently inconsequential details. One puts this book down longing for another "A Bend in the River" and hopes that the ground covered in "Beyond Belief" might just provide a worthy theme.
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11 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Slightly Clever, Visceral but Flawed, 28 Mar 2001
V.S.Naipaul's second journey into the Islamic world is a tortuous one for him and the (western) reader. It comes as no surprise to find the same themes (those of his earlier book "among the believers") reappearing with slight modifications in this book. His particular frustrations with the psyche of the oppressed has, it seems to me, come at a very high price to his erstwhile proclivity as a novelist. Though his insights into the confused minds of many post-colonial people render him, at times, close to revelatory insight they also delivery him, ever so rapidly into alleys of blindess. He is, for example, famously absent on those things which are likely to dissprove his findings, if they can be called that. As a traveller myself (and a westerner) his perspective is one which is routinely governed by a kind of internal malaise. A hypertrophied mind does not always make good literature; it sometimes (as with V.S.Naipual) empties it from within. I was somewhat shocked but not entirely surprised after reading the book. V.S.Naipaul's truncated Brahminism, the disorientation of his family's indentured status in Trinidad, may partly explain this sublimely jaundiced exercise in (self)discovery. The context in Trinidad may also explain this -`small -Islandism', where the brown suffers intense inferiority and will do, in the survival stakes, whatever it takes. This may mean doing what brown Trinidadians of Hindu origin are sometimes rather famous for doing; imagining themselves to be beyond the squalor in which they find themselves and by recourse to the very things which point to a dense poverty of soul, inferiority complexes and mimetic reflexes. In this half-way of `seeing' these various reflexes of survival appear to be his only guiding counsellors. I would think that objectivity, good judgement and an elevation of spirit are universally admired as such. Unfortunately, Naipaul's reflexes make bad counsellors. The appeal of Naipaul's books to a generation of similarly disoriented New World people (for reasons stemming from the shared experience of colonialisation but as colonizer) is transparent. It stems from the need to be told that our abnormality was or is not all that bad after all,which translates as a silly caricature of what is is to be "western". The plebians may want to be told and Naipaul appears to want to tell them. For those of us with the desire for objectivity, Naipaul's platitudinal approach is precisely a truncated Brahminism. It shines on the details only to fall back on itself with regards to the greater picture. I recognized some of the people Naipaul meets but I also recognize the absense of the many I found to well above anything Naipaul has seen or touched. Similarly, if the oppressed show all the signs of `oppression' what of the oppressor? The book does not go into any of this and does not show how and where the abnormalities of the european mind-set enabled the process to effect non-european worlds in the way it did. As a westerner, I prefer to get my dose on native well-being or sickness from the source if I have to. I see it as a wasteful thing to imagine that a dose could be gleaned from V.S.Naipaul's disfigured Brahminism or see in it a door to understanding either the Islamic peoples or even for that matter the peoples of India. I also found Naipaul's petrification not something I entirely share as a Westerner though I can imagine it in Port of Spain. To me it is sad that Naipaul has chosen to "stick with it". He should be told, preferably by a Trinidadian, that a poor man's aristocracy is no aristocracy.
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