This book of correspondence between VS Naipaul who is a student in Oxford and his family who is in Trinidad and India is a fantastic insight into the mind of a genius in his early years. Unedited, these letters also afford a glimpse into the difficult life that Naipaul and his family led during his years at Oxford. In midst of an uncertain future, the self confidence and arrogance of VS Naipaul (18 years of age) stands in contrast to the humility and frustration of his father- both great writers in their own ways. It also helps us to understand the complexity of VS Naipaul's personality esp. as it relates to the embarrassing and difficult relationship between him and Paul Theroux. A fascinating book- a must read for every person who enjoys biographical literature....

In 1950, 17-year old V. S. Naipaul left his home in Trinidad to study literature at Oxford. The letters collected here kept the Naipaul family connected from 1949 through 1957, and reveal the love, respect, and honest counsel "Vido" shared with his family during those years. They show that Naipaul's father Seepersad (1906-53), "Pa," was the family "guide" (p. 266) until his untimely death at age 47. For him, "the life of the mind--the writer's life--was everything" (p. vii), and he always reminded his son to "keep your centre" (pp. viii, 18, 31). He wrote to Naipaul: "Everywhere you will meet shallow-minded people; but it is precisely because they are shallow that they make a lot of 'to do'--we must learn to look at people objectively. Perception is rare and intelligence is by no means widespread. Those who have it to any unusual degree often suffer terribly: they are the most lonesome creatures in the world . . . Spot your drones and microbes among your fellow-creatures, but do not let them put you out of your centre" (p. 63). Naipaul's "Pa," we learn, also regularly coached him on writing: "When writing a good story it is a good thing to read good stories. Good reading and good writing go together" (p. 14).

Naipaul's father was always a source of intellectual encouragement, and these letters reveal a father and son always "in step" (p. vii). Naipaul recognized his father's influence upon him: "As I grow older, I find myself doing things that remind me of Pa, more and more. The way I smoke; the way I sit; the way I stroke my unshaved chin; the way in which I sometimes sit bolt upright; the way in which I spend money romantically and foolishly . . . The more I learn about myself, the more I learn about him . . . But who has shaped my life, my views, my tastes, Pa" (p. 126).

These letters not only follow Naipaul's intellectual growth at Oxford, but also reveal his periods of "black depression" (p. 235) and his nervous breakdown in 1952 and 1953. "I have found it difficult to live up to my own maxim," he advised his family prior to his collapse. "I say, 'We must ignore the pain-shrieks of the dying world,' yet I can't. There is so much suffering--so overwhelmingly much. That's a cordial feature in life--suffering. It is elemental as night. It also makes more keen the appreciation of happiness" (p. 9). He also reported to his family: "A feeling of emptiness is nearly always on me. I see myself struggling in a sort of tunnel blocked up at both ends" (p. 36). Later, he attributed his breakdown to "loneliness and lack of affection . . . some people, alas, feel more and think more than others, and they suffer" (p. 177).

The Naipaul letters also include correspondence from other family members, including the writer's free-thinking older sister, Kamla (1930- ). About the prospect of marriage, she wrote to her brother: "I have grown to hate the idea of marriage. I think it's the end of life" (p. 178). The letters are followed by an excellent Naipaul family bibliography and Editor, Gillon Aitken's index to the collection.

These are first-class letters. In an age when email is unfortunately replacing the personal letter, which has been reduced to "snail mail," the Naipaul family correspondence is a rare treasure full of genius I urge you to experience.

G. Merritt

Reader's of Naipaul's works, especially his travel books, are intrigued by a variety of things: his genius for observing people and places, his rational perspectives, his dispassionate comments etc. At the same time, one wonders when did this real Naipaul evolve? This book, which is a compilation of his correspondences with his late father and elder sister, convinces one that Naipaul was always like this from a very young age: a gifted man. The elder Naipaul, despite his many troubles as a homemaker, deserves credit for instilling an intellectual atmosphere in his household; which obviously Vidia has run away with.

Raghubir Singh is arguably one of India's most well-known photographers and certainly one of the best I have seen in print. Most photographers will shy away from colour but Singh composes beautifully in this medium (and it wouldn't do Bombay justice to shoot it in black and white...) Above and beyong his talent with the lens, he has a very keen eye for the city, and captures the personality of the people who live there: laissez faire, slick, cosmopolitan. A typically Indian book - unabashed and bold - appropriately reflective of its subject matter. Naipaul is an odd choice for designing this work, given his relative distaste for India, but creates the perfect tension to accompany the photographs. In summary, Singh is in prime form in this book, doing what he does best: chronicling the people that define a city.

V.S. Naipaul is arguably the greatest author of our time. Yet although a world traveler and a master conversationalist, he is reserved and enigmatic -- a hard man to get to know. Professor Jussawalla's book compiles interviews with Naipaul that date back to the '60s, shedding light on his personal as well as literary progress. This is 'must' reading for anyone with a serious interest in V.S. Naipaul.

This is the historical counterpart to Naipaul's "A Way in the World", even though it was written more than two decades earlier - these books should ideally be read back-to-back. It provides a history of Trinidad from the original discovery by the Spaniards until the early nineteenth century. The canvas covered is vast - the early Spanish attempts at colonisation, Raleigh's poorly-organised and squalid search for an El Dorado on the Orinoco, the arrival of French refugees escaping from the slave-uprisings on Haiti and the establishment of British control, with a leading but hardly-creditable role being played by Sir Thomas Picton, later a hero of the Peninsula and Waterloo, and the use of the island as a springboard for fomenting revolution in Latin America. It is from beginning to end a ghastly story, dominated by greed, cowardice and cruelty. There is hardly a single character who emerges with credit and at times the reader is all but overwhelmed by the catalogue of mean-minded exploitation, atrocities and treachery. As always in his non-fiction writing, Naipaul uses a novelist's eye to bring colour and life to the narrative - adding not just to the immediacy but also to the horror of much of the material. This work goes beyond historical narrative however and presents simultaneously an extended meditation on the nature of power at its most basic level. It is a terrible and disturbing work - but a great one.

'The Middle Passage' is the account of a sunny journey across the Caribbean in 1960-61. During his travelling, Naipaul enjoys the calypso in Trinidad, takes a memorable hiking trip to the Nutchi falls in British Guyana, travels around the picturesque roads of Martinique, enjoys a cool beer in Brazil, and goes to the beaches of Jamaica and Surinam.

However, Naipaul is not primarily interested in the joys which an average tourist might take from such a dreamt-of holiday. 'The Middle Passage' is a book with a purpose: it seeks to dissect the ways in which different Caribbean territories deal with the legacy of more than 400 years of European domination. There is very much Naipaul doesn't like about the people living in these (post-)colonial societies. But his sharp eye and elegant prose lead to a cascade of eye-opening, stunning and often merciless observations which makes this book still mandatory reading today.

On the multi-layered social structure of Trinidadian society, Naipaul says: "[The Trinidadian] is adaptable; he is cynical; having no rigid social conventions of his own, he is amused by the conventions of others. [..] If the Trinidadian has no standards of morality he is without the greater corruption of sanctimoniousness."

On the Indians of British Guyana: "Among more complex peoples there are certain individuals who have the power to transmit to you their sense of defeat and purposelessness: emotional parasites who flourish by draining you of the vitality you preserve with difficulty. The Amerindians had this effect on me."

On Martinique: "Martinique in the interior is prettily feudal, with a white or coloured gentry and a respectful mass of straw-hatted black people who can only be described as 'peasants', the twentieth-century literary discovery, whose soft manners, acquiescence in their status and general lack of ambition or spirit can be interpreted a 'dignity'."

Finally, on 'poor whites': "[H]ere and there in the West Indies are little groups of 'poor whites', whose poverty is their least sad attribute. [A]merindians 'sickened and died'; these Europeans [..] only sickened, and are like people still stunned by their transportation to the islands of this satanic sea."

This was a hard-nosed analysis of Naipaul's work as a whole. Without being overly jargonistic or heavily literary it managed to show the links between different phases of Naipaul's development, and give a sense of the overall development of Naipaul's thinking. It is not a pretty picture, and one that many of Naipaul's admirers will find objectionable. But the argument is persuasive and cannot be dismissed lightly. It is also valuable in providing the context for Naipaul's many books, which are often set in vastly different countries and cultures.

A House for Mr. Biswas, is not so much the story of Mr. Biswas, but of the South Asian extended family - its turmoil, gossip, reunions and joys. Naipaul is unerringly accurate when describing the extended Indian family: the competition between parents over the successes of each other's children; the power of money and elder authority; the elevation of boys over girls in terms of future possibilities and education.

Mr. Biswas is a heartbreaking and frustrating character. His mistakes, his ignorance, flares of tempers, and his valiant attempts at tryng to become independent from his mother's family turn him into a three dimensional character - one that you can both love and hate. His family is also well developed and complex - from his wife Shama to his young son, Anand, struggling under the weight of familial expectations.

This book didn't receive a four star review because it doesn't always capture your full attention. This is not the type of novel you spend all weekend reading. It is the type of novel that you read for a half hour to twenty minutes before going to bed, it's good but it's not enough to keep you up all night unable to put it down.

The second criticism I have of the book is its rushed ending. The novel itself has an interesting structure, in that we learn the future of Mr. Biswas, backtrack and then follow the course of his life up until his death. However, those few pages at the beginning of the novel are the same as what you receive at the end - a rushed and incomplete rendering of Mr. Biswas's dream - a house of his own. Also, the reader after several hundred pages is expected to remember the details from the beginning that Naipaul neglects to reiterate at the end. Considering the tremendous detail that accompanies the rest of the book one has to wonder if this was a planned theme: the realization of a dream isn't all that fulfilling; or was it simply laziness on the part of the author? That dilemma is for you to resolve.

A House For Mr. Biswas, the acclaimed novel by Nobel prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul, reads like an epic and is clearly the work of an accomplished writer. Naipaul's depiction of one man's life, beginning with his birth in rural Trinidad at which time he is labeled as "cursed" by the local holy man, is an extraordinary account of an ordinary man and his struggle to provide for his family. So why does this book, filled with beautiful prose, memorable characters, and heart-wrenching events, feel like it is about 200 pages too long?

Mohun Biswas, an ethnic-Indian born in Trinidad in the early 1900s, abruptly marries into the Tulsi family, and his life is from that point on dominated by his controlling mother-in-law, Mrs. Tulsi, and Seth, her brother and head of the Tulsi household. The Tulsi family provides him with housing and various jobs, ranging from managing their dry goods store to supervising their farm, but they also provide him with constant harassment and grief. Mr. Biswas longs for the day that he can own his own home, and his pursuit of this goal is the novel's persistent theme which gives it its epic quality.

A House For Mr. Biswas is, ultimately, a finely crafted novel. Naipaul's powerful, moving prose beautifully depicts the struggle, pain, and sorrow of one man's life; at the same time he paints a calm and full portrait of the ethnic-Indian experience in rural Trinidad. In many ways, this book does for rural Trinidad what John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath does for Salinas, California. It's only flaw, perhaps, is that the book's length feels somewhat forced, as if Naipaul believed that a 600-page novel would more powerfully depict his character's tragic nature than, say, a 400-page novel. The truth is that Naipaul's prose is so robust, and his characters so genuinely human, that A House For Mr. Biswas achieved the status of epic long before its final page.

This book is deservedly regarded as the new Nobel laureate's masterpiece. It is tells the life story of Mr. Mohun Biswas, a Hindu born in rural Trinidad. Mr. Biswas (and Naipaul ironically refers to him this way even when describing his infancy) is a poor Brahmin struggling to make something of his life. His father dies while he is still a boy and this causes him to exist as a poor relation held in low esteem first living with his mother on the stingy charity of his aunt and uncle and then with his wife's family, who treat him with similar contumely. Along the way Mr. Biswas has several children, including Anand who is the narrator of the story. Anand is, of course, Naipaul and Mr. Biswas is the author's father. On first reading I had believed that the book was much more of an autobiography than it really is. Naipaul has changed many of the names and places, perhaps to avoid giving offense to chararacters still living at the time the novel was first published (1958). Naipaul's brother Shiva, who was an accomplished author in his own right and who died prematurely in 1985, is not described at all. The ironic style gives the book a serio-comic feel that is quite true to life. The title's characters makes numerous failed attempts to at last have a house of his own, to get back to what he lost when his father died those many years ago. Every endeavor to make something of himself goes awry. His first job in a rum-shop ends when he is beaten and falsely accused of theft. His next job as a pundit's apprentice ends when he accidentally throws feces on to a sacred tree. There follow several other jobs, all of which eventually go wrong. Mr. Biswas is a failure at everything he does until the day he leaves his mother-in-law's house for the big city, Port of Spain. It is there that he first becomes a modest success as writer for the one of the island's major newspapers. My description does not do the book justice. The story itself is perhaps not very interesting at face value. It would seem at first that there is little in this book for a reader who is not a Hindu Trinidadian. That is not at all the case. It is the writer's gentle and loving telling of Mr. Biswas' life story interspersed with ironic and sarcastic comments resonating with the reader's own experiences of love-hate realtionships with his own family that make this a masterpiece.

Here is 1940s Port of Spain, Trinidad. Miguel Street is a melting pot at the ends of the British Empire, which, during WWII, is already on the ebb. Naipaul's first written and third published book tells the stories of Miguel Street's characters from the point of view of a young boy. Each of the stories are illuminating portraits of the limitations of colonial life. If you're looking for parables about poverty or racism, you won't find them here. Instead, you will find Naipaul's genius penchant for telling sad stories with great humor; and, rather than lessening the sense of the tragedy, Naipaul's humor makes it that much more impactful. Those who are also fans of Paul Theroux will recognize than the later writer used "Miguel Street" as the DNA for his "Hotel Honolulu."

This is the 1st book that I have read by Naipaul and can now consider myself a fan. Being from the west indies, but raised in America, the book made me understand the cultural significance of colonialism in the region. The characters are completely complex and at most times unlikeable, but at the end the reader comes to care for everyone one them. Although, the entire book is filled with humor, there are many moments of self realization and heartbreak. What's amazing about this book is that everyone has a Bogart, a George, a Man-Man, a Hat, and many more characters in their life!

A funny funny book. In retrospect has all the clues for the direction Naipaul took in his later efforts: an apologist for colonialism screaming at the cricket match through the voice of Hat : "White people is God."

V.S. Naipaul is a man of strong opinions, and they are often politically incorrect. He is the man who once, infamously, called the Third World the "turd world." This book is about one of his early forays into the turd world. I imagine that it did not please the Indian Tourism Board to read that India is "the world's largest slum" or that Indians are "a withered race of men." Not surprisingly, the young Naipaul - just barely into his thirties when he wrote this book - got labeled as a reactionary and a lapdog of the former colonial power in India.

Naipaul's bluntness produced a scandal and much misunderstanding. At closer inspection, however, his unflinching look at unpleasant realities (beyond his politically incorrect asides) reveals a man who is deeply troubled by what he sees. When he writes he transforms his anger into lucid, detailed observations. It is a stylistic attribute that also defines his later travel writing about India ("India: A Wounded Civilization," 1977; "India: A Million Mutinies Now," 1991) and about the predominantly Muslim countries of Asia ("Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey", 1981; "Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among The Converted Peoples", 1998).

In this early book published in 1964, his working method is revealed in more detail than in the later books. Naipaul decided to write about the flagrantly visible things whose existence is being denied, and about those personal experiences that are fresh and not worn out by having been described by other authors of travelogues.

The themes of the first four chapters can be summarized in the words poverty, caste, defecation, and failure. But Naipaul being Naipaul manages to transform the squalor of the world he observes into clean, cold and lucid prose. His language is, for the most part, that of a surgeon who feels neither contempt nor pity when he dissects. Naipaul writes that the "sweetness and sadness which can be found in Indian writing and Indian films are a turning away from a too overwhelming reality; they reduce the horror to a warm, virtuous emotion. Indian sentimentality is the opposite of concern." This explains why Naipaul's apparent detachment is so misleading: for Naipaul unsentimental description is - quite unexpectedly for the reader - a way of showing concern.

Naipaul is most effective when he is sarcastic. His book sparkles with rhetoric fervor when he quotes Gandhi on the squalor and shortcomings of India and points out that Gandhi's observations are still valid today. Chapter 3, "The Colonial," depicts the colonial's view of India. Incidentally, the colonial happens to be Mahatma Gandhi, and Naipaul quotes extensively from Gandhi's early writing. It starts with a quote just below the Chapter heading: "Well, India is a country of nonsense." Naipaul effectively turns one of the founding fathers against his successors who, in Naipaul's opinion, let the country rot in its stagnancy. Naipaul feels that India undid Gandhi: "He became a mahatma. He was to be reverenced for what he was; his message was irrelevant"; and that "his failure is there, in his writings: he is still the best guide to India. It is as if, in England, Florence Nightingale had become a saint, honoured by statues, everywhere, her name on every lip; and the hospitals had remained as she had described them."

When Naipaul writes about Gandhi, he also characterizes his own way of seeing and writing: "He looked at India as no Indian was able to; his vision was direct and the directness was, and is, revolutionary. He sees exactly what the visitor sees; he does not ignore the obvious. He sees the beggars and the shameless pundits and the filth of Banares; he sees the atrocious sanitary habits of doctors, lawyers and journalists. He sees the Indian callousness, the Indian refusal to see. No Indian attitude escapes him, no Indian problem; he looks down to the roots of the static, decayed society. And the picture of India which comes out of his writings and exhortations over more than thirty years still holds: this is the measure of his failure."

Bottom-line: opinionated and brilliant as most of Naipaul's writing, surely not a balanced portrait of India in the early 1960s, but definitely a must-read for anyone trying to understand Naipaul, and a good case-study how easy it is to misunderstand the intentions of a writer or how easy it is to use quotations out of context to malign someone.

In his native Trinidad Naipaul had always somehow been of India without being Indian. After 12 years in London, and possibly in an attempt to regain some sense of his own roots, he decided to take a sabbatical year in India in 1962. This book is the fruit of that year.

It begins inauspiciously enough with some amusing but not too jarring description of the endless troubles involved in bringing a bottle of liquor into India. We've all heard of India's elephantine bureaucracy, and Naipaul confirms to us that this is (was?) the case. Of much greater interest are the little fables he weaves to explain his view of how in India function is more important than action (i.e., ritual cleanliness is much more important than actual cleanliness) and gestures count more than reality (although this is common to many third world countries). Contrary to the impression a foreigner might have of chaos and aimlessness, India is in fact strictly regulated to a degree unknown in the West. Everyone has a place and a function, and such place and function are infinitely more significant to an Indian than what a Westerner's profession or skin colour might be to him. This provides a transition to another of Naipaul's interests, which is the nature of the relationship between the Indian Republic and the British Raj. According to Naipaul, the idea of Britishness is inextricably bound up with the Indian empire, and the British created themselves as an imperial people with a God-given mission, even as they created the Indians as a subordinate (inferior) race and state. Bound up with these deep meditations are the stories of his dealings with various landlords and hoteliers. Particularly amusing is his running relationship with the staff of a small hotel on Dal Lake, in Northern India, where he experiences the mutual dependency between masters and servants familiar to russian and ancient regime writers. He (the master) is often abused by the staff (the servants) and forced to perform meaningless or denigrating activities. The staff, however, treat him with an almost comical respect when confronted by third parties. Clearly the servants derive their respect from the respect shown to their master. The relationship is almost medieval.

And this is Naipaul's next point. India is not a modern country because there is no sense of the passage of time, but rather passive acceptance of everything, and an escape into the land of imagination to compensate for what otherwise would be a reality too painful to bear (but again, this is also a feature of other third world countries such as that of Colombia, and a source of Magical Realism a la Garcia Marquez).

The book's final part has a fascinating reflection on the nature of English writing on India and Indian writing. Naipaul disparages virtually all literary creation in the sub-continent (with a couple of minor exceptions including Narayan). He likes Kipling and has no clear opinion on Forster (he would eventually develop a strongly critical perspective on this author as well, deeply tinged by his antipathy to the writer's homosexuality). The ending is bleak, punctuated by his frightening falling in with a racist Sikh (who is a dead ringer for Europe's skinheads of a decade later) and a depressive visit to his grandfather's hometown, when he realizes that the distance between himself and India is unbridgeable. The backdrop is provided by the Chinese invasion and Indian defeat (this defeat is the last of endless defeats over the past millenium, and an emblem for them all).

The book, although picturesque in some points is extremely bleak and really justifies Naipaul's famed ability to stare at reality in the face, and not flinch. Whoever believes Naipaul has singled the Muslims for special abuse (in such works as "Among the Believers" and "The Suffrage of Elvira") only needs to read this disconsolate book (his first of a couple) on his own homeland to confirm that Naipaul does not believe in playing favourites, and will shine the passionately cold light of his wit on everything that catches his eye. The book is in parts obscure and disorganized, but very insightful. This reviewer shared Naipaul's sense of grossness and void, as he contemplates utter misery and hopelessness (this is a feeling many peoples might have today: former Zaireans, Sudanese, Palestinians, Colombians, Bhurmans, to name just a few). His refusal to compromise is not fuelled by self-hatred (as has been suggested by some commentators) but rather by a powerful self-awareness. It's no wonder many Indians hated the book. Not being Indian, and not therefore needing to be appeased, I liked it very much.

I first read this book when I was 12 years old (23 years ago) and it amazed me on how an author who is a x generation Indian like myself feels when he returns to the land of his forefathers.
I vividly remember the first chapters regarding VS Naipaul's attempt to recuperate a bottle of liquor (Metaxas) amidst one of the worst things that India inherited from the British: -i.e their bureaucracy.
His description of Kashmir, wow ...transports you there and reminds us of a place bereft of the strife which we know of today especially thanks to those fundamentalists.
Brilliant Book...the first author who got me interested in reading serious stuff

This is one of the better books I've read on India. Set in the late 80s I think this book gives a very deep insight into India of that period. Naipaul sees things that very few of us Indians see (I am an Indian who has lived in India almost all his life). I believe one of the reasons Naipaul's perspective is so interesting is because he has the added advantage of someone who is not necessarily tied to the Indian psyche by being involved with India on a day-to-day basis. At the same time someone who has lived with the concept of India since childhood.

The only drawback is that if an outsider hopes to understand contemporary India through this book it will give a good but not complete perspective since much has happened in the last decade.

This is a big book about India and its people. When you start to read this book you indubitably bring your own baggage of views and expectations, which color your subsequent grasp of the book and the picture it presents. I am an Indian expat and like many other expats, I am often called on to present my take on my homeland. Having grown up in India I could relate to my immediate experiences and my family. I like most Indians had no sense of history(other than the post independence interpretation found in most books on India), how they came to be and where my people are in relation to the world. India is fragmented into so many religions, classes &castes it is almost impossible for an ordinary Indian to grasp the whole.

This book by Naipaul attempts to paint a picture of the whole and define the crux of what it means to be an Indian(a very modern concept). Naipaul is perfectly suited to this task, with his curious mind and very sharp observations. After having followed India over three decades, he does have a handle on the mentality of an Indian, at the same time he relates to the wider world and has a sense of perspective. This book presents a collage of people from different parts of India, different classes, castes, religion. He attempts to find out what drives them within the wider social context and how they see themselves, their values and their expectations and how they are standing up to the changing times. His portraits are clear, sympathetic and samples the wide spectrum of India. The people we meet are a varied group, a lower caste former Naxalite leader from the south, to a former Nawab of Lucknow, gangsters from Bombay, a disillusioned Sikh, a Bengali Boxwallah... An access into the minds of such a wide cast of people is definitely the best thing about the book. You could take from this selection what interests you; strange cultural practices, triumphs and tragedies of a slum dweller or a struggling Brahman. Fascinating details that an Indian might not spend a second thought on are illuminated by this author of Indian origin. In spite of so many people and interviews, the narrative is for the most part easy going and does not leave you stranded. This is because there is the underlying theme to the book I talked about earlier and Naipaul's skills a great travel writer.

Naipaul's quest is not truly an Indian one, i.e. it is not a quest that an Indian would undertake, as he/she is ensconced in a rich cultural mythology that gives a sense to every ones place which most people accept in the normal course of life or are frustrated by its limitations, but learn to accept it as part of the 'tension of living'. Naipaul's quest is an occidental mind's attempt to know India. That is not taking way from it any of its value, as from his unique perspective he sees things that others easily miss. At the same time in many parts of the book, he fails to grasp the underlying thoughts and world view of each of the Indians he meets. He is more in his element when he meets people of the educated class in the cities and towns but fails for the most part in getting to know the peasant. This is sometimes only too obvious when Naipaul meets some of the people to be interviewed in the plush surroundings of his hotel, which some of his interviewees are probably setting foot for the first time in their lives and which they would be talking about long after the author has gone. This is where his occidental mind fails, it fails to see the Indian peasant from how he sees himself and has a condescending respect for his hard life.

In spite of its very few limitations, this is the best book on India I have read(I rank it higher than his earlier book, An Area of Darkness). It is sincere and sympathetic and you do come from it feeling you know the people of India better. This is also an important book that probes the Indian psyche in this time of change. Indians for the most part are opening up to the world and are bucking up to see a lot of changes in their lives & culture, mostly irredeemable.

In this book Naipaul takes you through a fascinating journey through India of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Naipaul can really look deep into people's lives, facets and and their backgrounds. I have found this book one of the most interesting and insightful on India. I have lived most of my life in India and feel that Naipaul notices and thinks about things that I've come to take for granted.