6. ‘Footloose, he began to travel for long periods in India and Africa. It
was at a time of decolonisation, when so many people the whole world
over had to reassess their identity. Naipaul saw for himself the resulting
turmoil of emotions, that collision of self-serving myth and guilt which
make up today's bewildered world and prevents people from coming to
terms with who they really are, and to know how to treat one another.
On these travels he was exploring nothing less than the meaning of
culture and history.’
‘Naipaul has written about slavery, revolution, guerrillas, corrupt
politicians, the poor and the oppressed, interpreting the rages so deeply
rooted in our societies’
‘Melancholy grips him at the spectacle of "the steady grinding down of
the old world" as he put it, and he might complain to an interviewer
that he is living in a "plebeian culture that celebrates itself."’
David Pryce-Jones
7.
8. ‘Many people have strong opinions about this Trinidadian expatriate, including
the reviewers and interviewers he regularly deals with. The dividing line is
essentially political, a fact that might be disquieting for a creative writer. In this
respect Naipaul is more like Solzhenitsyn than, say, Joyce, whose appeal can
transcend (or confound) traditional political divides. In the case of Naipaul,
those on the left, especially defenders of the ‘Third World’ and its hopes, from
C.L.R. James and Edward Said to Michael Gilsenan, more or less uniformly
find him and his attitudes troubling and sometimes bigoted. He is portrayed as a
self-hater and Uncle Tom, a product of the sorts of complex that Frantz Fanon
diagnosed. On the other side are the conservative writers – those who might see
Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a major intellectual figure – who celebrate Naipaul as an
original voice, a writer who provides a searing, politically incorrect indictment
of all that is wrong in the modern world: Islam in its various manifestations, the
grotesque dictatorships of Africa, the squalor and self-inflicted misery of much
of the Third World, the failure everywhere of projects of métissage between the
West and non-West.’
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Where Does He Come From?’ LRB 01/11/2007
