Reviewed:
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling by V.S. Naipaul

Part One: “Ego and Circumstance”
Part Two: “About the Author”
Part Three: “A Life of Extraordinary Callousness”
Part Four: “I Went Out And Achieved Anyway”
Part Six: “Indians Defecate Everywhere”
Part Seven: “Autonomy, Complexity, Effort, And Reward”

In his essay “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” Naipaul writes that non-fiction enables some obfuscation, but “fiction reveals a writer completely”; in the same essay, he writes of returning to Conrad again at different stages in his life, detailing his attitude as it slowly modulates from contempt to admiration. Ironically, it is Naipaul’s non-fiction that is the most revealing, for just as his perception of Conrad changed, so did his perception of himself. And this perception of himself has colored his perception of everything else: his travel-writing has traced the same trajectory of waxing narcissism.

For example, An Area of Darkness, written a few years after Mr Biswas, begins with a “traveler’s prologue,” a madcap anecdote where Naipaul attempts to reclaim two bottles of spirits confiscated at Bombay customs; this picaresque narrative is an amusing story, as well as a brilliant way of introducing us to the interconnected and institutionalized bureaucratic hell that chokes off Indian progress. India: A Wounded Civilization, of the same period as A Bend in the River, starts with an essay of self-reflection, a meditation on Trinidadian Hindu rituals that were like “trapdoors to an endless past.” An Area of Darkness is classic first-person Naipaul, with the author as the main character; India: A Wounded Civilization is mostly dispassionate, third-person analysis, with much of the material recycled and reimagined, somewhat sterilized by distance and dispassion.

It is the little first-person in India: A Wounded Civilization that yields Naipaul’s most interesting insights: this endless past, he says, dictates how most Indians live; they are irredeemably stuck in a backwards-looking state of Rukmanian bliss, unaware that they are nothing, and happy to be it. But at the same time, the prophet of globalization observes that “there is a new kind of coming and going in the world.” From here it is not so far to see that capitalism must surely come to these people and change them, for better or for worse: “the world is what it is.” Capitalism enables people to exercise their egos – “with money, you can be whoever you want,” says a character from The Wire – but Naipaul sees his subjects as being all circumstance. He dehumanizes them not by dragging them into capitalism and imperialism, as Edward Said contended; he dehumanizes them by disbelieving in their capacity for transformation.

For someone who foresaw globalization, who wrote lovingly of Mr Biswas and of Salim with imagination and precision and pertinence, who transcended his own context to make something of himself, it is an inexplicable myopia: India, far from being “the poorest country in the world,” is now swiftly modernizing; not all of Africa, which Naipaul once proclaimed to have “no future,” looks to have no future; and now Naipaul himself, once hailed as “the world’s writer,” seems in this way dated and irrelevant, guilty of the same inward-looking oblivion which he ascribes to his most contemptible objects of observation. Naipaul’s alter ego in A Bend in the River, Indar, wants everyone to know “what kind of battles he had fought,” but now Naipaul is disinterested in this too; the “wounding” has completely superseded the “wounding,” and all that matters is Naipaul’s ego and his subjects’ circumstances.