This is the first Naipaul book I've read (following Paul Theroux's "Sir Vidia's Shadow", which I highly recommend), and it has spurred me into reading more from Naipaul. Not to bring anyone into disregard, but I believe it was high time for the Nobel Committee to return to richly satisfying writers of a monumental girth (such as Naipaul, Saramago or Garcia Marquez, to name just some of the more recent ones) when choosing its literature prize winners.

To the Suffrage of Elvira, then. The story is a simple one, very charmingly told. "Pat" Harbans is a man on the verge of old age who, mainly to be in a position to benefit from public works contracts (roadworks)decides to stand as a candidate for MP for the region of Elvira, Caroni District. It is 1950, the second election after Trinidad's independence from Britain, and in Elvira there are 8,000 voters, of which the majority are of Hindu origin, with a few Muslim, Black and "Spanish" ones thrown in. Mr. Harbans is traveling to the town of Elvira to visit Baksh (a rambunctious tailor who is seen as the leader of the Muslim group) and Chittanrajan (a rich goldsmith, who leads the Hindu faction). His hope is to get Baksh's and Chittanrajan's support, thus ensuring his final victory in the elections. During the trip everything seems to go wrong. Harbans runs over a dog and almost hits two American Jehova's Witnesses on bikes. He sees these events as an ill omen, and he is not mistaken. In Elvira he is forced to pay through the nose, as all his future constituents take him for a ride that doesn't end until the end of the book. He is forced to appoint Baksh's son, Foam, as campaign manager and to agree to his son's marriage to Chittanrajan's daughter. He is forced to open an account at Ramlogan's run shop for his supporters, and is eventually forced to pay for the privilege of visiting ill Hindu voters, for the burial of a political opponent, and for a motorcade on election day. Everyone, and not the least Harbans (who is not at all suited for the rigours of a campaign, who hates to talk in public and easily falls into depression) is flawed. Harbans's main opponent is a black candidate, nicknamed Preacher (who comes across mainly as a religious fanatic), and the chief of Preacher's campaign is a confidence man named Lorkhoor. I won't tell much more, not to spoil the pleasure of future readers, but suffice to say that even the more appealing characters (Foam and Chittanrajan) are not without their blemishes. This is small town, third world life, warts and all. And the election is absolutely true to life, and not only for Trinidad, but also for many other similar regions. I am not Trinidadian but Colombian, and I could recognize all the characters portrayed.

Naipaul is Swiftian, but not as acerbic as would be the case in his future works. The election (and, indeed, democracy) is a mockery, and, while everyone tries to take advantage of everyone else, the strong prevail whereas the weak fall by the side, not without having inflicted some damage as a price for their destitution. No one is too weak to spit and bite and even the big beasts sometimes have to retreat (although they win in the end).

The book is funny and probably was very difficult to write in spite of its short length. I regretted not knowing what happened with the Jehova's Witnesses in the end, and I think Naipaul could have given Preacher a bit more of air time. But otherwise, I have no complaints. Read this book. "Do your part, vote the heart".

This is a short book, and the subject matter is fairly commonplace - the book is about an election. However, Naipaul is such a master of constructing personalities, that the subject becomes completely fascinating and the lives of the characters that populate the story are as involving as the plot. All his characters - Harbans, Chitaranjan, Baksh, and the town of Elvira - are developed with amazing natural grace and, as always, Naipaul's conversational style is engaging from start to finish. The story itself is consistent with themes he previously explores: provincialism, tragedy, self-consciousness, and how the individual finds his place in the world. I still recommend "Miguel Street" as the perfect introduction to the author, but TSOE is right up there on the list of his must-reads - not only because it is a heartbreaking story but also because it is a full display of Naipaul's technique.

In my high school literature class I was the kid who sat in the back and cursed my stars anytime I was called upon to offer my views on a text. When we started reading Naipaul's "Suffrage of Elvira" everything changed. I moved to sit right under the instructor's nose and many a times took over the discussion of the book. The book is simply that good! Since those days I've read a lot more and I'm still seeking a book as entertaining, and thought provoking as this one. Mr Naipaul, I take my hat off to you and I'm pleased that Nobel Prize finally found its way to you. A truly truly brilliant book, by a truly truly talented writer.

It is a rear book of two essays that dealt with the author's own personal experiences in two entirely different worlds. Prolouge to an Autobiography, the first one was more personal than the second one and it was related to his background in Trinidad and Indian ancestry. I enjoyed reading it mainly because of my Indian background, and if there was something intrinsic I might have missed it because of the same reason. I need to read it over.

However I found something remarkably valuable in the second essay, The Crocodiles of Yamaoussoukro. It was more of a travel type dealing with foriegn (African) culture with certain intrinsic revelations about the human nature itself. It showed presence of spirituality behind the primitiveness. Acceptance of the way things happen was delicately brought out through people from Ghana when they say "Yesterday we were all right. Today we are poor. That is the way it is. Tomorrow we may be all right again. Or we my not. That is the way it is." ; and throuh Arlette when she says thing like "But the world is sand. Life is sand" when she tries to explain the unstability of Life. Nailpaul draws the parallel themes between this practical acceptance of Africa and that of the Hindu doctrine of Karma.

Naipaul is probably the most focused writer of our times. Only he could have written such observational essays. I highly recommend them to any one with an open mind and a desire to finding one's own center.

As you read the first pages of the introduction to Naipaul's Truth, you may feel as if you've come across a work so scholarly in nature it is almost unfit for human consumption. But don't be discouraged, for if you prevail, you'll find Feder finds her step and opens up the world of one of the greatest living writers of our time.

Feder (Distinguished Professor Emerita of English, City University of New York) purports that long before "genre blur" became trendy, V.S. Naipaul was a master of "genre fusion"; known for his use of autobiographical material in his fiction and travel narratives. As proof, she asks us to entertain the certainty "Naipaul's journeys to India have been descents into himself as much as explorations of the land," and consider his description of his family life in childhood, echoed in The Middle Passage (1962): "It had given me...a taste for the other kind of life, the solitary or less crowded life, where one had space around oneself."

Such is the making of a writer.

With Naipaul once describing "his purpose as an author as nothing less than a 'commitment to deliver the truth,'" Feder examines his "methods of searching for the truth," which include "observation, empathy, evaluation, self-criticism, and revision - an ever-expanding method in an ever-changing terrain." In doing so, she poses some ambitious questions: "How do fantasy, denial, and self-deception expose their ambiguous intentions?" and, "To what extent does the particular social and cultural background of the writer limit or enhance his comprehension of his own and other cultures?"

A clue to the answers to these questions might be found in Feder's observation that the "breadth of knowledge gained over years of travel, study, and self-examination have sharpened the 'eye' Naipaul refers to so often, enlarged his receptivity, and refined his skills as a reporter."

Naipaul - and his father, himself a writer and journalist - "assumed that he was to be a writer" by the time he was 11, and agreed he would eventually "escape" his native Trinidad through a scholarship to Oxford. He participated, from an early age, in the creation of the many drafts of his father's fiction, listening to the stories and offering feedback. Until his father's death in 1953, the two "praised, advised, and encouraged each other." Late in life, a letter from father to son would relay advice from an editor of the former: "Write sympathetically," while adding, "and this, I suppose, in no way prevents us from writing truthfully."

Naipaul would find his voice in fiction, as in Miguel Street (1959), which deals with the people and places of his boyhood. It is an early example of his blending of autobiography and fiction, progressing from covert to overt only in the last line of the book: "I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac."

Naipaul has said it was the writing of his fourth novel, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), that "changed him." Upon its completion, he found "a sense of security that was entirely new, the security of a man who had at last made himself what he wanted to be."

Feder's analysis of Naipaul's work is insightful, as in her comparison of a passage in A House for Mr. Biswas and the author's own childhood: "He is silent when his father asks: 'You want to come with me?' He 'only smiled and looked down and spun the bicycle pedal with his big toe,' displacing his longing on the surrogate object."

And through Feder's study we find other clues about how Naipaul writes: through empathy and identification with his characters, for he has an uncanny ability to find elements of himself in every character through his concept of a "universal civilization."

Be that as it may, Feder's careful eye also reveals the approach of identifying with one's subjects is not without its drawbacks: "In an evaluation of his chapter on British Guiana written many years after The Middle Passage, [Naipaul] attributes his earlier failure to foresee the goals of the two Marxist leaders, Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, to the fact that he 'shared to some extent the background of both.'"

Having learned from his mistakes, we later glimpse, through Feder, Naipaul's professionalism in his self-censorship of an article he wrote about the guerilla wars in Argentina in 1977: "Naipaul wrote 'Argentine Terror: A Memoir' soon after he left the country but, dissatisfied with the article, he put it aside.... This 'confusion,' it seems, had to do with his feelings of 'how close' he had come 'to the dirtiness of the dirty war.'"

In the end, Feder's extravagant command of both her subject and the English language results in a book that should not be read, but rather savored - and pondered at length.

The first half of Naipaul's much heralded HALF A LIFE makes a fine promise that this writer can spin delectable webs. Perhaps a familiarity with the atmosphere and history of both India and England makes the gradual growth of this story delicious. Then POW - we're off to Africa and for this reader the story becomes less important and less interesting, and yes, a bit preachy. I think the premise of this short novel is well drawn - that what we as individuals inherit genetically and sociologically and philosophically creates a destiny that need not be folllowed. There is much to be learned about the caste system of India, the concept of the class system in England, and the disintegration of race indentification in Africa: reading this book will certainly inform us of the sad state of affairs that retards our beliefs in equalization of all men. Maybe that is enough for a book to accomplish. But the characters mouthing these social blunders are less than fleshed out. With the exception of Willie, the main character, the rest of the cast is vaguely painted and doesn't carry our hearts the way this writer usually reveals. I'm not sure this is a good starting book for readers who want to know a Nobel Peace Prize recipient's work.

"Half a Life," by V.S. Naipaul, tells the story of Willie Chandran, born to a priestly caste father and a lower caste woman in India. The novel follows its conflicted protagonist to England and to a Portuguese colony in Africa; along the way we see both his romantic/sexual strivings and his efforts to express himself as a writer.

This book offers a fascinating glimpse at the disintegration of colonial regimes in India and Africa. This is a novel with a truly global span; Naipaul creates an intriguing group of characters and interrelationships. There are a number of characters whose relationships or backgrounds reflect the crossing of lines of caste, color, and/or ethnicity. The story is nicely enhanced by Naipaul's straightforward prose style. It's a tale of love, rebellion, loss, regret, and the quest for identity.

Having discovered V.S. Naipaul by reading A Bend In the River after spending a year in Central Africa some 20 years ago, and having read virtually all of his fictional works, or at least the ones he calls fiction, I was delighted that simultaneously he finally won the Nobel Prize and had a new book coming out.

It is an exceedingly interesting and powerful work that presses the idea of identity from cross cultural encounters in a way that it is both unique and affecting.

Seeing the humanity, social position, reception and morality of his characters all at once makes it possible for him to pose the position of their identity, their "half lives" in ways that leaves one speechless. Indeed, at the end, one is not sure who is every leading his or her own life or even half of one.

This is one of his weaker books. In this, he recycles rather silly psychoanalytic ideas of Sudhir Kakar to describe India, and falls flat on his pace. Nevertheless, it is a useful book to see the evolution of Naipaul's understanding of India.

its sheer cause it cuts, but what this guy has said is
true.
Dont buy this book if you are looking a fluffy travelouge
Naipaul's best gift is presenting complex human emotions
in a simple fashion. I like his non fiction better, but
thats because the matter he covers in his interviews.
Check out his 2 books on traveling through islamic countries also. They dont pertain to india but the psyche of a lot of characters is the same.
A lot of his writing has to do with his age. He is 70+ and
non-white. His generation had high hopes for the 'civilizations'
recovering from colonial-imperial-racial oppressions and joining
to create a global civilization. But the road has not been easy.
"Are the former colonies better off now ?" This is the question
that he is allways asking. I am in my 20's and naipauls literature helped me see the world in an honest non-delusional way. I recommend this to younger readers because when people
his generations are gone and the cultures will eventualy change,his work will serve as an educational link to learn the emotions at work in day to day working of those individuals.

What can one say about V.S. Naipaul the essayist? This collection contains most of the shorter pieces that have made his reputation. There are the beginning pieces on India, and there are the well-known essays on Michael X, on Mobutu, on the collapse of Argentina in the 1970s. There are also the later pieces on the failed Grenadian revolution and on Cheddi Jagan, the Marxist Guyanan politician who was kept out of power by American and British electoral skullduggery. There are also several essays on America, including ones on Steinbeck, a surprisingly uncontemptuous piece on Norman Mailer's 1969 mayoralty campaign and a particularly perceptive piece on the 1984 Republican convention. And finally there is the concluding essay "Our Universal Civilization."

Surely there is much to support the opinion of Naipaul's enthusiastic followers who at the same time have praised him for refuting liberal sentimentalities. There is the fine readable prose and the cutting observation. One notes this in the essay about the election campaign in India where the conservative candidate spouts pseudo-Gandhian rhetoric about the purity of agriculture in a land of desperate poverty. The candidate even says that piped water would only make the women who spend several hours going back and forth to wells lazy. There is the theme of a lethal sentimentality: On the Jan Singh party "Like parties of the extreme right elsewhere, the Jan Singh dealt in anger, simplified scholarship and, above all, sentimentality." On Steinbeck: "His sentimentality, when prompted by anger and conscience, was part of his strength as a writer. Without anger or the cause of anger he writes fairy-tales." On Republican Party Ideology: "Americanism had become the conservative cause, and Americanism was most easily grasped, most ideal and most sentimental (sentimentality being important to any cause of the right) in comic books...and the lesser cinema." In the essay on the return of Peronism there are many caustic remarks against Jorge Luis Borges, about Borges' failure to critically analyze his country's past, the theme of racial degeneration in his work, and his tasteless jokes about the systematically slaughtered Argentinean Indians. Likewise, there is some truth when Naipaul says of Argentina that "...to be European in Argentina was to be colonial in the most damaging way. It was to be parasitic. It was to claim...the achievements and authority of Europe as one's own", even if it is more true of, say, Canada. And certainly many of the essays are very powerful: such as the essay on Michael X, a self-serving thug and hustler who prattled "Black Power" rhetoric in Trinidad before murdering two followers and being hanged for them.

One should criticize his view of Islam, starting with his use of the term "Mohammedan." Naipaul argues that the imperial conquests of Islam were especially nasty in the way that the Arab culture simply denounced the pre-existing culture into oblivion. This is an oversimplification for several reasons. First off, the examples he uses, Pakistan and Iran in 1979, are not typical even of those countries' long histories, let alone of other countries like Indonesia or Nigeria. Secondly, one can find equally boneheaded comments in the history of Christianity, whether it is of Augustine and other church fathers dismissing Aristotle and Plato, or the Protestant Reformation's lack of enthusiasm for the Renaissance. Thirdly, what about Christianity and American Indians?

Nevertheless when one looks at the essays on Mobutu's Zaire, now collapsed into brutal civil war, or at the essays on Argentina before the Dirty War or the nervous essay on the Ivory Coast before President Houphouet-Boigny apparently "successful" rule collapsed into disaster. Surely one can only praise Naipaul for his prophetic talents, for the courage of his pessimism? Quite frankly, I have some doubts. If sentimentality is unearned emotion, it should be remembered that pessimism can be unearned as well. Consider the essays, written more than thirty years ago, about Belize and Mauritius. They are just as pessimistic as the others, about mass unemployment, overpopulation and empty politics. Notwithstanding that the two small countries have remained democratic states for the past three decades, not something one would have predicted from Naipaul. The concentration on superstition and magic can be amusing: Naipaul relates a report about an old Indian sage who claimed that he was now able to walk on water, arranged an elaborate demonstration, and promptly sank. But whether it is India, or the Ivory Coast, or Argentina, Naipaul is always looking for something silly or superstitious and this palls. There is much that is depressing about Argentina: but to say that Argentina has produced nothing more than New Zealand is cheap, and Naipaul does not even bother to mention Sabato, Cortazar or Puig, who might challenge this view. It also strikes me as gross oversimplification, to say the least, that the essence of Argentine sexuality is brutal heterosexual sodomy. There is something profoundly unhelpful about all this: professional pessimists too have the luxury of having return tickets in their pockets, and when conservatives praise Naipaul one feels that it is because he grants his subjects just enough freedom to justify their condemnation into hell.

When one reads Naipaul's nonfictional essays, and compares them with his fictional works, one is most certainly not as impressed. In this prolific collection- 550+ pages, Naipaul documents his diverse essays, on diverse topics, from India to Anguilla, from New York, to Algeria. Let me begin with the first essay, which, not surprisingly, regards a visit to the city of Calcutta. There is a slight background material- about Trinidad, and then starts the prophet-of-doomsday attitude. One is almost irked when continually perusing through words like "decaying", "morbid", "ruin". If India would actually be a dying culture, it would have by now been history. But it still persists, flourishes, and exports it culture. Naipaul is relentlessly critical of Indians, deeming them "indifferent", "primitive", etc. He lashes out at Hinduism with a sudden passionate loathing- "The barbaric rituals of Hinduism are barbaric, the idea of the holy cow is absurd." All this gives an impression of a ceaslessly pessimistic man, who is born to extract only the most troubling aspects of Indians, ignoring the democracy, ignoring the culture, ignoring the slow progress, ignoring the values- in short, making a thorn of every petal. But, one must admit, Naipaul's opinions about India are true, and being an Indian myself, it is nothing extraordinary. But of cruelty, and malice, one does not approve- Naipaul's satire on the Indian accent: "Esomerset, Eshelly, Eshakespeare", is almost as if Naipaul is on some evil mission to forever degrade common people. If writing about such extraneous incidents is your idea of humor, Mr. Naipaul, certainly we do not approve it. This attitude of rooting out the utmost filth out of a poor country, reveals how depressed Naipaul is, and how audacious, let go haughty.
But there is something almost magical about Naipaul's words, his interpretations are often profound, and his humor cultivated. The second essay, about the election in Ajmer, is captivating. At the end, you feel as if there lies a novel in the entire essay on the election, and a good revelation on the politics of India. Gradually, the essays become less profound, more documental, and more random. But one question still haunts- if Naipaul glorifies the West, and rubbishes the third world, how come most of his writings are on the third world, or non-western cultures? Why not write about Germany? The reason is that Naipaul finds material to criticize to be absent in the West- it merely serves as a model- a model of perfection, and a useful tool for deriding colonial peoples, though deriding impressively.

Caught up by the hoopla manifested by a new Nobel Laureate, I darted myself into a bookstore and picked up the first Naipaul book I eyeballed. I was expecting the best of Hemingway's descriptiveness and Cela's ingenuity rolled into "The Enigma of Arrival." Instead, the author delineates the parallels experienced in his tropical childhood, some borish English acquaintances and an uncelebrated De Chirico painting.

Notwithstanding his extravagant and lethargic plot, Naipaul does display a divine ability to graphically adorn his pages using a crisp and succint narrative. He draws out a map of bountiful trees laid geometrically and described poetically, yet bemuses his readers with arcane episodes in vague environments.

A book in which a refined and educated young man experiences a world he knew too well... in the books he had read ("I was like a man entering the world of a novel, a book; entering the real world"), Naipaul's autobiography is too personal a testimony to which only a few can feel receptive or entertained.

This gorgeous book, a memoir and novel intermingled, is one of the strangest and most hypmotic I have ever read. V.S. Naipaul is known, unfairly, almost exclusively as a political and travel writer; few critics seem to have noted the extraordinary beauty and intelligence of his work or its profoundly personal, philosophical underpinnings. Here Naipaul, with no exotic backdrop or apalling human decline to reflect upon, comes out of the dark shadows and reveals himself as a kind of ascetic Proust. In spare, deeply controlled prose, he writes of his walks through the English countryside where he lives, and what he sees. While Naipaul is falling in love, late in life, with his adopted home, it is becoming disfigured by time and change, and soon what he loved is lost. His attempts to cope with that change, to avoid grief, to see coldly and without sentiment, shape the book. The overall effect is, in fact, much like that of Proust, but maybe wiser and certainly less indulgent. But it demands patience and reflection (Naipaul's thick-headed protege Paul Theroux didn't get it), so be warned.

Without question this is a strange book. It has no real plot, the arrangement of its sections is odd and their relationship to each other somewhat mysterious, and the attention to detail can be maddening. When I first attempted to read this book some years ago, I had to stop part of the way through, as I couldn't understand what was going on or why Naipaul had written this.

Fortunately I tried again not long afterwards; Naipaul is one of my favorite writers and I figured anything he wrote was worth at least a second try. The second time round I read much more slowly than the first time, trying to savor the precision of the prose and enter into the narrative more fully. The book's effect on me was dramatically different as a result. I became absorbed in the reading ("hypnotic" is how one review I read aptly described the prose), and I began to see the book's underlying themes: the existentialist need to make one's own place in the world in the face of decay and death, the power of art to transform experience and fight oblivion, how the writer sees and knows the world. Naipaul develops these themes slowly and subtly; they are woven deeply into the narrative, and can be easy to miss for that reason. But once you begin to see them, reading this beautiful book can be a profound and moving experience.

And so, despite the strangeness and the hard, slow reading this book requires, I would tell people that it is so worth the effort of careful study. Naipaul has written no ordinary novel here, but something rare and beautiful. A truly great book.

I came back to this novel after giving up on it after the first chapter a few years ago. I have read Naipaul's non-fiction account of the Michael X murders in Trinidad in his "The Killings in Trinidad." The book fictionalizes the story of murders committed at a black-power commune led by Michael X, a former pimp and accused rapist who returned to his native Trinidad in the early 1970's after living in England for many years.

The novel is very dark and grim with a sense of doom and gloom permeating the lives of all the characters. There is not one likable character. Naipaul takes pains to imply that the book is not set in Trinidad even though the actual events did occur there. This Trinidad is very different from the folksy Dickensian Trinidad of A House for Mr. Biswas and The Mystic Masseur. The Trinidad he describes in this book is a dreadful place ready to explode with civil war and racial violence. The wealthy and mostly white live in fear in exclusive enclaves in mortal fear of their own servants. The underclass blacks live in slums seething with barely suppressed violence.

The atmosphere of fear is well described but it unfortunately does not make this an enjoyable book. There were several stylistics touches that I found especially irritating. A very representative example is at the very end of the book. Jimmy Ahmed is the Michael X character. Near the end of the book there is a sex scene between Jimmy and Jane, the visiting British hipster. This sex scene becomes a rape scene. Just before Jimmy sodomizes Jane, ... he forcefully kisses her, forcing her mouth open and spitting into her mouth while repeatedly saying, "love, love." I can only interpret this as an inability on Naipaul's part to write sex scenes.

Scenes such as this leave the reader with a bad taste in his mouth. Avoid unless you feel you must read every word the great man has written.

An overall sense of doom and nihilism permeates the novel, and Naipaul's laconic and repetitive style is just as effective in describing the drought-plauged landscape of the island nation as it is in exploring the dysfunctional relationships between the characters.

Naipaul's characters have a tendency to digress into purely political exchanges that sometimes (at least to the North American reader) seem to come at the expense of character development. But this style of writing is by no means accidental. The novel is set on an impoverished Caribbean island where, in Naipaul's words, "politics...was often a man's only livelihood".

The relationship between the outsiders (visiting foreigners) and the insiders (the native population) defines the novel.

Meredith Hebert, a peripheral cabinet minister for the moribund ruling party, is juxtaposed against Peter Roche, an exiled anti-apartheid subversive from South Africa. Meredith struggles to understand Roche's apparent political apathy and indifference, even regarding his own torture at the hands of the South African regime. Roche's mistress, Jane, carelessly dabbles in the life and affairs of Jimmy Ahmed, the narcissistic and irresponsible leader of a failed commune and a reluctant and ineffective revolutionary.

And Harry de Tunja, the wealthy local, just wants to get off of the island and is consequently branded a pariah in his own community.

I was not familiar with the historical events that inspired Naipaul to write the novel, so I didn't know how things were ultimately going to turn out. Perhaps it was partly for this reason that I found the ending particularly gripping and well written. The final chapter is a convincing description of the subtle lunacy that ultimately characterizes all human tragedies.

This book is not an easy read, but at the same time it is not an overly complicated work. Overall, I found it to be a great introduction to Naipaul's writings and I would highly recommend it for anyone that is lucky enough to have a week at the cottage.

Pair this sometimes graphic novel with Dostovesky's Demons (The Possessed, The Devils) -- dramatic exposures of the association of privileged but sick-souled fellow travelers with revolutionaries. As with the Dostoevsky novel, although there are flashbacks the main narrative recounts just a few days, with much conversation and some near-monologues of the principal characters, lies, rumors about the past of the revolutionary leader's behavior abroad, movement of characters here and there between just a few main locales, arson fires breaking out in the city, and murders. Strengths of Guerrillas include the sensory precision of its drought-stricken island setting, and the rendering of anxiety, fear, manipulation, resentment, and vanity throughout the book.

I listened to Naipaul's nobel lecture, and found many of the things he touched on in that speech echoed in this short work. Naipaul speaks at length about growing up in Trinidad, and of the people he encounters. He speaks about his education. He also speaks about his father's short stories. Reading this book gives one a good sense of what led Naipaul to his first novels, as well as what led him to his later ones. The somewhat puzzling ending wraps up the writer's pessimism re: the future of the novel, which I found disingenuous. It's both unconvincing and the ultimate ingratitude to the form that won him the Nobel Prize.

I was introduced to V.S. Naipaul a number of years ago principally through his non-fiction. He is an elegant writer with unique perspective and insights. Although his unusual background is well-known to his audience, the first half of this spare book (64 pages) focuses on how his desire to become a writer ultimately developed substance. There are some wonderful passages about his father's habit of reading portions of books to his son that emphasized the particular qualities or character of the author. I found myself wanting to learn more about this relationship because it seems that it explains a good deal about Naipual's interests and his style.

The second portion of the book is a bit more disjointed. It opens with Naipaul speaking about the two Indias: the political India (of Ghandi and the freedom movement) and the personal India (of his grandparents)and how it has been represented in literature and how that representation misses the essence of the country. The final portion is an interesting analysis of the evolution of the novel and how Naipaul views it as a derivative form that is nearing the end of what it can do.

The first half of the boook was the most valuable to me as it added to my understanding of the writer and his craft and particularly about Naipaul as an artist. If you enjoy his work this should be of interest to you.

'Reading and Writing ' by V. S. Naipaul ( Pub. New York Review Of Books ,2000) A review by V. Ramsamooj Gosine.

In spite of its brevity, Reading and Writing ' by V.S.Naipaul is compulsive reading for anyone who is interested in the development of this writer and by extension other writers.

This short work of non-fiction ( 64 pages), examines critically the strands of history which have shaped and reshaped Naipaul's thoughts and ideas . For example, Naipaul pays glowing tribute to his father whom he saw writing patiently and enthusiastically. Little Vidia listened to his father read stories and this greatly influenced him . So much was Vidia influenced that at age 11 he had already decided that he wanted to become a writer. It was a noble thing and he wanted to be part of it.The book also sifts through memories of his childhood, his days at Oxford, and his earliest attempts at writing. We are all influenced by the landscape we grew up in. It is an inescapable fact and Naipaul is now sharing that experience with his readers, at the same time, he is looking at the material from a distance.

This reviewer would have preferred a longer work in which Naipaul develops his major concerns on which his imagination fed: the Ramlila of The Ramayan, his anthology of Literature, his father's love for books which he got Naipaul interested in , Mr Worm, his primary school teacher, and the cinema. The basic themes are there and only readers who are acquainted with the material could readily understand the discussion. Those who have lived outside the colonial system would have certain problems.

Not surprisingly, Naipaul thinks that education ( in his days ) produced only crammers , not real thinking men. This is the sort of opinion Naipaul forms when he analyses what he himself has been through.

Even after Naipaul had written his earlier books and was set on the road to becoming an established writer, he was still searching, examining and analysing everything around him , including definitions. One gets the strong feeling that Naipaul is not the sort of writer who readily accepts things easily. Evelyn Waugh defined fiction as ' experienced totally transformed ' while Joseph Conrad ( a writer Naipaul admires ) saw the novel as a 'fabrication of events which properly speaking are accidents only.'

Naipaul questions and draws his own conclusions. In this way, he does nothing impulsively and accepts nothing without reservation , but shapes and reshapes. In parts of 'Reading and Writing' Naipaul shares his own attitude to new raw material. And this is definitely worth looking at.

In this autobiographical piece, subtitled "A Personal Account,' and written for the Charles Douglas Home Memorial Trust, the reader may have stumbled upon bits and pieces of information before but Naipaul painstakingly organizes his information l in such a way that each idea contributes and guides the reader along.

'Reading and Writing' could be read in one sitting but truly , the work should be read slowly and meticulously. There is just so much to absorb and to consider if one is really to comprehend the mind of a great, gifted writer. Naipaul often presents different viewpoints , which invite the reader to weigh and consider just as he did when the material first presented itself to him. In this way, Naipaul admits the reader into the curious laboratory from which he emerged.

In Part II, Naipaul continues a discussion - the importance of the novel - which he has raised elsewhere. He focuses on the novel and its uses in the later 19th century and now wonders whether the novel has served its usefulness. Interestingly enough, he quotes long passages from Charles Dickens and R.K.Narayan and makes pronouncements on their fiction and in all this, Naipaul the enquirer is still engaging his mind in discussion. What 'Reading and Writing' reveals more than anything else is that Naipaul, the artist, is always challenging his mind to get at the best. Serious writers , especially the young, should read closely his conclusions. Naipaul is not unfair. His roving critical eye would not permit him to write second rate pieces. It is the sort of standard he places on himself.

Naipaul thinks that,' Literature ,like all living art is always on the move....No literary form , the Shakespeare play, the essay, the work of history - can continue for a very long time at the same pitch of inspiration .' Harsh but realistic ! Is Naipaul then on a quest for another form to carry out his work ? And is he attempting to create a new form to mirror the world ? He partly answers the question in the new form he uses in his later travel books, (eg. India: A Million Mutinies Now ), but from all appearances ,he is still evolving something.

'Reading and Writing ' opens up a new world for us to examine. It is not the world he created but it is colonial Trinidad , India and Motherland , England. This is certainly not a text to be rushed through, short as it may be, but it certainly gives an insight into Naipaul, the writer.