V. S. Naipaul’s Journeys: From Periphery to Center

Krishnan (Reading the Global), an associate English professor at Boston University, devotes this insightful analysis to postcolonial themes in the work of the late novelist V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018). A divisive figure, Naipaul won the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, but was also described by detractors as a “troll,” who would periodically “feed the media with soundbites... calculated to provoke outrage,” such as disparaging comments about India, from which his grandparents had emigrated. Krishnan does not attempt to explain away the troublesome aspects of Naipaul’s worldview , but instead understand how Naipaul’s experiences with racial tensions while growing up in Trinidad’s Indian immigrant community informed his writing. Krishnan quotes Naipaul as writing in The Enigma of Arrival, “My subject was not my sensibility... but the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in.” Krishnan offers nuanced and careful readings of Naipaul’s major works, with a particular focus on Naipaul’s 1979 Africa-set masterpiece, A Bend in the River. Krishnan sees it as a chronicle of postcolonial pragmatism in which the protagonist, Salim, much like Naipaul, incorporates the West’s view of other cultures as “exotic” and inferior into his own worldview as a way to deal with and manipulate dominant Western cultures. Krishnan’s jargon-free study will prove invaluable to serious readers and Naipaul scholars alike. (Feb.)