Literary Occasions : Essays

Rating:
Summary: Inside the Outsider
Review: This collection brings together mostly previously published essays by V. S. Naipaul (b. 1932), surely one of the greatest writers living amongst us. The only previously unpublished essay is the lecture he gave when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Because the essays are generally autobiographical and/or about literary topics, there is a good bit of repetition. His story of growing up in Trididad, member of an emigrant East Indian family, son of a newspaper journalist, winner of a government grant to study at Oxford is well known to anyone who has read much of his work. Still, he brings a clarity and ease in his writing that makes it a delight to read.

The simplicity and rightness of his prose is all the more obvious after one reads the book's introduction in the clotted style of its editor, Pankaj Mishra. Immediately following that introduction is the invaluable 'Reading and Writing, a Personal Account,' previously published as a 60-page book. It is an invaluable source of insights about how a writer gets his start by reading and how he discovers his 'subject.' 'In my fantasy of being a writer there had been no idea how I might actually go about writing a book.' He took heart from the career of Joseph Conrad, which didn't begin until his late thirties. And then, suddenly one day while sitting in a BBC freelancer's office a single sentence describing a scene on his childhood street in Port of Spain popped into his head. He typed it out and it led to the composition of his first short story. And he never looked back.

The other longish piece here is 'Prologue to an Autobiography.' In it he describes incidents from his childhood--the extended Trinidad Indian family of which he was a part, the struggle of his father to be a writer. Then follows a lovely and loving preface to the edition of his father's only book, 'The Adventures of Gurudeva.'

Throughout these essays the theme of Naipaul's outsider status in the Western world (and in India, for that matter) is examined from different angles. He does this partly by examining several autobiographies by Indian writers, including that by Gandhi. He goes on to say--and this is a valuable tip for anyone interested in Indian writers trying to make sense of their place in the wider world--'[Nirad] Chaudhuri's "Autobiography" may be the one great book to have come out of the Indo-English encounter.'

There is a meditation on the art of Conrad; understandably Naipaul senses a kinship with that peripatetic non-native English writer. He goes to the heart of Conrad's style when he says 'the Conrad novel was like a simple film with an elaborate commentary.' The same could be said, I suspect, of Naipaul's own novels: think of 'A House for Mr. Biswas,' for example.

The Nobel Lecture does not plow new ground. It is a summation of his two-worlds experience and neatly done.

This is not a necessary book except for the Naipaul completist, I suspect. But it is a fascinating experience to have his collected essays on the experience of the outsider.

Scott Morrison