Naipaul reveals roots in 'Literary'

Ashley Simpson Shires, Special To The News

Published October 24, 2003 at midnight

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The most unique aspect of V.S. Naipaul's writing is his perspective: that of severe displacement.

His new book, Literary Occasions, reveals the source of that perspective in a series of autobiographical essays. Several of the essays are prologues for his books, several are literary essays contemplating the work of other Indian writers (including Gandhi), and the last, Two Worlds, his 2001 Nobel Prize lecture, reflects on the whole of his writing experience.

Naipaul was born to an Indian immigrant family in Trinidad, an island near Venezuela, in 1932. Trinidad developed as a New World colony, with a large population of Indians who immigrated as indentured servants in the late 1800s. Naipaul was a legacy of this indentured generation, growing up with Hindu customs on a Caribbean island.

Naipaul's search for identity colors all of his writing. In many of the essays, and sometimes repetitively (since the essays weren't originally intended to be published as an anthology), he documents his early years living in a tiny village named Chaguanas. His grandmother's house is described as being part Indian (the front decorated with sculptured lotus flowers on pillars) and part French Caribbean.

In school, Naipaul reads books that are written in English, the language he speaks; yet he describes the literature as "an alien mythology." Authors write about a foreign landscape and social structure.

"Dickens's rain and drizzle I turned into tropical downpours," he writes. "The snow and fog I accepted as conventions of books."

In the midst of the insular environment of Trinidad, Naipaul's father is sparked with the ambition to become a writer. Naipaul credits his own ambition to his father's, and marvels at the miracle of it.

"Trinidad was small, remote, and unimportant," he writes, "and we knew we could not hope to read in books of the life we saw about us." Naipaul's father breaks through this boundary in 1943 and writes short stories about local characters.

Naipaul pursues the dream to be a writer even further than his father, studying on scholarship at Oxford and later moving to London. It is while he is living in London, working as a freelancer for the BBC, that he writes the first words to his first novel. Though his experience in the world has broadened and his vision widened, the character that he finally settles on is Hat, a figure drawn from the streets of Trinidad.

"To become a writer, that noble thing, I had thought it necessary to leave," he writes. "Actually to write, it was necessary to go back."

After his own career has been firmly established, Naipaul has the honor to write a foreword to his father's collection, The Adventures of Gurudeva. He critically assesses the book and explains its origins, writing, "I find it remarkable now that a writer, beginning in the old Hindu world . . . where all the answers had been given and the rituals perfected . . . I find it remarkable that such a writer, working always in isolation, should have gone so far."

V.S. Naipaul has also gone remarkably far, from tiny Trinidad, with its fading memories of India and its slave-historied past, to his accomplishments as an international writer and commentator, to winning the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Naipaul documents his journey in Literary Occasions, revealing his roots in each essay and critically analyzing his own growth. He explores the influences of his family, his culture, of other Indian writers and of other literary figures along his path. He celebrates the act of reading and writing as an act of growing.

In his Nobel Prize lecture, he writes, "At every stage I could only work within my knowledge and sensibility and world view. Those things developed book by book."

Ashley Simpson Shires is a freelance writer from Boulder. Her work has been published in literary journals, including the "American Literary Review" and the "Paterson Review."

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