About book The Writer And The World: Essays (2003)
For decades, V.S. Naipaul has played the part of sassy gay friend to the Third World. (Never mind that he’s actually straight). He’ll come swishing into some post-colonial backwater, give the place the once over, and then start in with the home truths: your society is sick, your economy is a joke and your government is a horror show. And I don’t know what they told you at the store, but those jeans make your ass look ginormous.Naipaul is a writer of many virtues, but cultural sensitivity is not one of them. Wherever he goes, he can be counted on to find something incredibly tactless to say:On India: The absurdity of India can be total. It appears to ridicule analysis. It takes the onlooker beyond anger and despair to neutrality.On Argentina: ...an artificial, fragmented colonial society, made deficient and bogus by its myths.On a group of black American women serving as missionaries in the Ivory Coast:They were ill-favoured, many of them unusually fat, their grossness like a form of self-abuse, some hideously bewigged, some dumpling-legged in short, wide, flowered skirts. They were like women brought together by a common physical despair.So is Naipaul a hater? Indubitably. Should this worry you? That depends on your politics. But before you go putting him on your personal Index Librorum Prohibitorum, I’d just point out that half the writers worth reading are haters in some respect, from Christopher Hitchens all the way back to Yahweh himself. You know who’s not a hater? Deepak Chopra. Make your own decision.
Naipaul travels and writes giving a whole lot of insight from all the corners of the world. Wherever he goes he seems to have a way of finding out the just how the past influences the current and what have gone wrong and what will go wrong. Whether in India, Trinidad, Ivory Coast or Argentina. Not always an easy read of course, I found myself struggling on some of the longer essays. Some of these essays are written a long time ago. Especially the ones in India that regards certain events and politicians that are now almost 50 years back in time and no matter how well Naipaul writes I just have a hard time knowing just what do with them. I found the book most fascinating when you could tell how he used some of the experiences from his travels later on in his fictional books. Like how Michael X and Gale Benson from the commune in Trinidad appears in Guerillas or how he describes using a certain feeling he got from the dirty wars in Argentina but putting it in a African setting for A Bend In The River.
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I confess the only Naipaul work I had read was A house for Mr. Biswas. I started this book (a collection of essays) by reading the essays on Africa. However, his essays on on India had me hooked. Lovely prose and very interesting observation on India during the late 60s and 70s. The observations are so symptomatic that are as true today as they were when Indira Gandhi split the congress. He does paint India in a poor light. Specifically his commentary on Indian civilization.Still, this collection are a must read.
—Saurav Chakravorty
V.S. Naipaul is a wonderful author. No one disguises his biases better. He simply records observations. Only at a few key points will he more than hint at a his personal response. Still his sensibility comes - and it is strange to observe that in spite of the subtlety one knows that he's not got a gentle edge. This is a collection of essays I read and owned several years ago. I wanted to re-read his bits on Argentina and the Ivory Coast, but found him again so readable I went ahead and re-read everything but the essays on India.text #1: how to observe.
—Thomas
