An original voice.(A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling)(Book review)

A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, by V. S. Naipaul (Knopf, 208 pp., $24.95)

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THE career of V. S. Naipaul is a marvel. Born in Trinidad into a family originally from Indiapoor people from a poor background--he might have spent his life unknown and unsung in the margins of the Third World. Instead he has made himself into a writer and artist recognized internationally for his insights into the human condition.

Of course he had a vocation, but he still had to develop the means necessary to express it. A lifelong endeavor, this has been a matter of asking questions about the nature of everything that he could observe, from small domestic details to wider issues of race and gender, and finally to the historic movements that define culture and civilization. Ever since the Age of Enlightenment, intellect and reason have been the tools enabling the individual to find himself and his rightful place in the world. To learn about oneself is also to learn about others. Anyone and everyone who makes full and proper use of the mind can become a free spirit like Naipaul, no matter where he began or who he might be: That is the great and liberating example he has set.

A Writer's People is a late step on his journey of self-discovery. Here is an autobiography of sorts, recording individuals and moments that have left their impression on Naipaul. It is also literary criticism of a sort, picking out a few of the writers and books that influenced him. Naipaul makes no claim to be giving a complete account of himself or his life, yet this book is such a work of art, its writing so consummate while also so subtle and allusive, that the reader acquires a warm sense of Naipaul and how he came to his understanding of himself and the world we live in.

In Trinidad, the people he grew up with had been shaken loose from their Indian or Hindu heritage, with no very clear idea of what had been lost or whether anything significant had been gained. Seemingly nothing much could be made of an existence like theirs. Naipaul's own father was an exception, trying to write fiction out of the local material. Though published, these short stories of his lacked authenticity because they mistakenly imitated the model available in English magazines of the period, trick endings and all. Naipaul also picks out the moment when a man was fetched from India to make mattresses for the family, and how this man had no observations to make about himself or India. His own mother, Naipaul says, never read a word he wrote, taking it all on trust. Later on, he was to come across the memoirs of an Indian who had been shipped to Surinam rather in the manner of the Naipauls in Trinidad, but who could render his experience only as destiny, or a kind of wonder. Spiritual or mental poverty was the cause of the repetitive emptiness and loss inherent in all such encounters and exchanges.

A surprise is the amount of attention devoted in these pages to classical authors including Cicero, Julius Caesar, Polybius, and Virgil. Apparently the school that prepared Naipaul for the scholarship he won at Oxford also taught him Latin (in which case Trinidad cannot have been quite the forlorn dot on the map that he makes it out to have been). The purpose of these brief but brilliant glosses on the classics is to show that there is a constant in how human beings interpret the world: Even the most intelligent Romans saw only what they wanted to see, failing to recognize that there were things they did not, or could not, see. He makes the same point in an even more brief and brilliant passage about Gustave Flaubert, a wonderful writer when drawing directly on experience, but hopelessly artificial about what he did not know and was obliged to invent.