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Born in Trinidad of Indian descent, a resident of England for his entire adult life, and a prodigious traveler, V. S. Naipaul has always faced the challenges of "fitting one civilization to another." Here, he takes us into his sometimes inadvertent process of creative and intellectual assimilation, which has shaped both his writing and his life. In a probing narrative that is part meditation and part remembrance, Naiapul discusses the writers to whom he was exposed early on and his first encounters with literary culture. He looks at what we have retained and what we have forgotten of the classical world, and he illuminates the ways in which Indian writers such as Gandhi and Nehru both reveal and conceal themselves and their nation. Full of humor and privileged insight, this is an eloquent, intimate exploration into the configuration of a writer's mind.… (more)
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It is quite likely that winning the Nobel Prize in some sense devastated Naipaul. Since winning the prize in 2001, he has not produced any major works, with only Magic Seeds appearing in 2004 and this collection of essays A writer's people. Ways of looking and feeling in 2007. fans of Naipaul had to wait till 2010 for his next book, The Masque of Africa.
The essays are very well-written, and, going by their titles could have been very interesting. "Worm in the bud" outlines Naipaul's growth and genesis as a writer, but his self-centredness makes his appear the central axis of the universe. While one might argue that within his world, that is the world of his creation, the author is, in fact, the central creating force, real-life references to his father and contemporaries make this first essay seem overly self-centred.
The second essay, "An English way of looking" consists of an uncalled for cowardly back stabbing beyond the grave of Anthony Powell, whom Naipaul elsewhere called his friend. The author describes how soon after coming to England as a beginning author, he met Anthony Powell, and it is clear that to some extent, this friendship benefitted Mr Naipaul. It is all the more strange that he goes on to describe his disappointment in Powell. Whatever the merits or demerits of Powell's work, Naipaul's condemnation of that work as a pinnacle of mediocrity is futher proof of the bad taste of this essay collection.
Naipaul has written extensively on India, but the third essay, "Looking and not seeing: the Indian way" adds nothing to it. It is a longish, boring essay, mainly on Indian history, which reads like an occasional piece pulled of the shelf to act as a filler, as with the fifth essay "India again: the mahatma and after". It is therefore puzzling why the two essays about India are separated by the essays called "Disparate ways", which mainly deals with the work of Gustave Falubert.
Some of the essays feel as if they have been "prepared" for this collection. this is noticeable by a sudden swing in the focus of the essay, as if a number of introductory paragraphs or pages was added. The result is a sense of disorientation, as the main focus of some of the essays is different from what the first two pages lead in to.
Readable, but unfair.
"The worm in the bud" looks at Caribbean writers who played a role in his early awareness of literature: his father, his
"An English way of looking" is another essay that mixes praise and blame, talking about his long friendship with Anthony Powell, who acted as a kind of literary godfather to Naipaul, introducing him to editors and getting him jobs. With some embarrassment, Naipaul admits that although he greatly enjoyed Powell's company and appreciated his help, he had always taken his status as "distinguished British writer" on trust, and it wasn't until requests for obituaries started coming in that he had a proper hard look at "Tony's big book" and realised that he found it mediocre, dated and clumsy. That forms a framework for him to launch into a wider discussion of the postwar literary scene in England, with various little barbs aimed at Greene, Waugh, and co.
"Looking and not seeing" and "India again" are about Indian ways of looking at the world, and focus on four sets of memoirs. Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography is clearly a book he's re-read many times, and he is fascinated by Gandhi's character and the way the "Indian" persona he built up for himself brought together all kinds of disparate cultural ideas picked up in England and South Africa; an obscure memoir by an Indian migrant to Surinam, Rahman Khan, who was roughly contemporary with Gandhi, seems to be more an illustration of how Indians can travel the world without ever (mentally) leaving India, whilst the memoirs of Nehru and the anglophile Bengali intellectual Nirad Chaudhuri throw other perspectives on Indian politics and the legacy of imperialism. This is interesting as far as it goes, but Naipaul spoils it rather by using it as a platform to launch a blanket dismissal of post-independence Indian (-diaspora) literature as generic American-writing-school stuff.
In between the two Indian pieces is "Disparate ways", where he uses a critique of Salammbô (compared unfavourably to Chapter II of Madame Bovary) to stake his claim on the French and Latin cultural traditions, contrasting Polybius's cool, professional account of Carthage with Flaubert's artificial and rather operatic approach. Without ever mentioning Edward Said, who must have been in Naipaul's bad books for some reason!
Interesting for what it tells us about Naipaul's background, and fun in the way of things that are shamelessly opinionated but leave the reader with plenty to disagree with.