Writer Meets World.

In 1950, at the age of 18, V. S. Naipaul made his first journey from his native Trinidad to England, from backwater to metropolis. A decade later he began to move from the center back toward the periphery, to societies that for different reasons were struggling with their modern circumstances. A new anthology, "The Writer and the World," published last week on the Nobel laureate's 70th birthday, traces this passage, Naipaul's reckoning with what he has long seen as an area of darkness, populated by men trapped by history.

Upon gaining their freedom, he argues, former colonies found themselves dazed and disoriented, often unequal to the task of self-government yet unwilling to return to Europe's ambiguous embrace. Naipaul illustrates the dilemma in his 1967 essay "Jacques Soustelle and the Decline of the West," with the story of one of the last governors of French Algeria. Soustelle was a brilliant scholar of the ancient Aztecs who devoted himself to ensuring the continuity of the French Empire, which he saw as the only way to incorporate Algeria into modernity, as well as the only way to preserve France's place in the wider world. His views, like Naipaul's own, are easy to caricature; like Naipaul's, they contained something to offend everyone. Soustelle believed that "true decolonization would have come from incorporation, with equal rights and an equal advance for all."

Naipaul's own early fear of remaining trapped in Trinidad colors much of this book. On Mauritius, an overpopulated island where many of the young yearn to be nurses so they can work abroad, Naipaul describes those left behind: "Many of them get headaches, those awful Mauritian headaches that can drive an unemployed laborer mad, interrupt the career of a civil servant and turn educated young men into invalids." But Naipaul's pity is not reserved exclusively for the colonized. It comes through even in a hilarious profile of Sir John Paul, one of the last governors of British Honduras, now known as Belize, who filled his days by painting watercolors. "One doesn't really have a full-time job," he tells Naipaul. "One tends to be a little isolated and divorced. Quite rightly: the country runs itself. One doesn't want to impinge." The twilight empires resist ideological characterization; neither thumpingly glorious nor lavishly cruel, they became in their decadence and isolation mere traps of human potential.

The book offers few remedies: the essays are full of warnings to intellectuals who would get involved in politics. After being defeated in his 1969 run for mayor of New ...