V.S. Naipaul: Critical Essays (In 2 Vols.)

V.S. Naipaul has claimed that all his work is really one and he has been writing one big book all these years; also, considering the world he has stepped into and the world he has to look at, he cannot be a professional novelist in the old sense. In early youth Naipaul took up the vocation of a writer as his religion and, since the beginning five decades ago, has drawn on his intensely personal experience of an uprooted person adrift in the world, his experience of the two worlds to none of which he could really belong—an experience that imparts the authentic voice to his works—both non-fiction and fiction—enriched by a distinct autobiographical flavour. Naipaul himself is split into his characters in whom are manifested subtle shades of his emotions and traits. He is ‘accidental man’, ‘dangling man’, ‘history man’ and the ‘mimic man’ all rolled into one. Naipual is also one of Literature’s great travellers, and his absorption into the experience of rootlessness, the alienating effects of colonial past on today’s postcolonial people has taken him to Africa, South America, India and all over the world not in search of roots but in search of rootlessness, and has yielded a rich harvest of travelogues which are about much more than travel. An author of a large number of fictional and non-fictional works, Naipaul continues to surprise, excite, provoke and move readers at every turn of his literary voyage. Naipaul has unseverable emotional bond with India which remains for him an area of pain, ‘an ache for which one has a great tenderness’ yet from which he wishes to separate himself. The world of V.S. Naipaul is the world of two worlds. The present volumes of papers on Naipaul, led by Naipaul’s Nobel lecture, offer illuminating perspectives and interesting explorations into this rich, enigmatic, sad, hilarious and fascinating world of Naipaul.