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A Way in the World
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
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A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
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amaing book truly novel prize worthy
- By Owen Cook on 21-10-2021
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The Mystic Masseur
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.
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Miguel Street
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
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Story
"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents, this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.
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In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
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In a free State
- By Anonymous User on 31-01-2021
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India: A Wounded Civilization
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
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The Magic Barrel
- By: Bernard Malamud
- Narrated by: Shelley Berman, David Cromer, Marge Kotlisky, and others
- Length: 27 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the author of The Natural comes a classic short story about a young rabbinical student and his fateful encounter with an enigmatic matchmaker. A co-production with the National Jewish Theater. Recorded before a live audience at Chicago’s Guest Quarters Suite Hotel in July 1992.
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A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
-
-
amaing book truly novel prize worthy
- By Owen Cook on 21-10-2021
-
The Mystic Masseur
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.
-
Miguel Street
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents, this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
In a free State
- By Anonymous User on 31-01-2021
-
India: A Wounded Civilization
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
-
The Magic Barrel
- By: Bernard Malamud
- Narrated by: Shelley Berman, David Cromer, Marge Kotlisky, and others
- Length: 27 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the author of The Natural comes a classic short story about a young rabbinical student and his fateful encounter with an enigmatic matchmaker. A co-production with the National Jewish Theater. Recorded before a live audience at Chicago’s Guest Quarters Suite Hotel in July 1992.
Publisher's Summary
In a vastly innovative novel, Nobel Prize-winner V. S. Naipaul intertwines memory and history to create what is at once an autobiography and an ambitious fictional archaeology of colonialism.
Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh, who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the 19th-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded in East Africa.
Among these presences is a narrator who bears a telling resemblance to Naipaul himself: a Trinidadian writer of Indian ancestry and English residence boldly trying to come to terms with the mystery and transience that is his inheritance.
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What listeners say about A Way in the World
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 26-06-2021
Great cultural and social history
This is a beautifully narrated story, from one of the great writers of our era. A very pleasurable listen.
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- Yas
- 01-11-2020
Biographical pathway
This a Biographical pathway through the life of a wonderful writer. Not since reading the biographies of Gandhi & Churchill have I come across a more remarkable personality of their likeness.
2 people found this helpful
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- tomasito
- 28-08-2019
An inspired and brilliant voice for our times
Naipaul’s extraordinary writing talent combined with his unique experience of the preserved traditions of India transposed to the Colonial Backwaters of the new world give him special insights and expression of the complexity of history that only the novel can provide. A Way in the World is an excellent example.
1 person found this helpful
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- Norman Johnson
- 16-09-2018
ugh!
struggled to get through it. Not a good choice for such a good narrator like Vance
4 people found this helpful
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- John A.
- 12-03-2022
A great book
A fantastic book that is very well written. I found this book to be developmental and maturative to a young man coming of age like myself. I very much like the author and further highly recommend this book.
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- JK
- 14-09-2021
ENJOYE
An other masterfully written book by V.S. Naipaul.
It is a collection of short stories, written as an autobiography.
The narrator, Simon Vance, reads the book at a fast pace, so don’t let your mind wander, JK
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- Anonymous User
- 08-08-2021
Riveting
Everyone, especially Naipaul's many detractors, would benefit from giving this a listen. And it is narrated especially well.
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- Joy
- 08-08-2021
Do not bother
it's the way the author or rather the narrator says about black as if it is the nastiest thing he's ever had to say and then he says colored occasionally and I'm not really sure if he understands that that word isn't used in a modern-day book and this book is not taking place in the time frame that would make it colored ethnicity or race not for me don't think anybody black would enjoy it by the way black is the word to use not colored not Niger not black in the way it was spoken
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- AuntGert
- 01-04-2021
Rather a slog
Although described as a novel, this book reads like a history lesson with multiple historical facts, descriptions, and citations frequently repeated. Despite such repetitions, the speakers in the history selections are hard to separate and then you find that confusion doesn’t matter so much because these imagined conversations are not especially interesting or entertaining. If Naipaul includes the backstory of colonized Trinidad as a way to understand the island of his upbringing, it’s odd that he only focuses his history on the 17 & 18th C Spanish and British invasions with little to no focus on the Indian diaspora to which he belongs.
Also, as great a reader Simon Vance is, he’s a peculiar choice for this book. Did Naipaul develop a posh upper class Brit accent, abandoning his Trinidadian accent when going to Oxford University? The book is told from three different first person narratives, with only one (Sir Walter Raleigh) being an educated Englishman. Therefore, Vance’s accent and manner of speaking seem to belong to someone other than a Trinidad or a Venezuelan general.
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- Ladyfilosopher
- 17-01-2022
syntropy brought me to this book
this book flows while carrying the reader between islands and continents, the past of one current life time and dashing through many lifetimes in the remote past. Echoes of themes held so bitterly in his book "Mimic Men" sounded between the chapters, but with much more humanity, charity and warmth (enhanced by the narrator's tone?). His history is peppered with self awareness I had forgotten he was capable of. i will be reading every bit of material that he has written.
1 person found this helpful
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