For a writer of “obvious greatness”—as Dwight Garner termed him in The New York Times—it is remarkable that V.S. Naipaul is so well known, in life and now in death, for his many flaws. His catalog of sins has been well established: He was an ogre in real life, especially to the women closest to him; he was an ogre in his writing, especially in his unfeeling portrayal of women (again) and Africans, Indians, Muslims, Trinidadians, and other subjects of the post-colonial world; he was a reactionary, a misanthrope, and a narcissist, all of which suffused his work. The famous opening sentence of his novel A Bend in the River (1979), set in an unnamed Central African country, has often been taken as his brutal credo: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”



The theme of Naipaul’s greatness—the great writer who stands in contrast to those men who are nothing, who will slip into a vast nothingness as if they had never existed in the first place—runs through his work. In India: A Wounded Civilization (1976), the second in Naipaul’s trilogy on his ancestral homeland, he describes a group of laborers in a typically pitiless and racial fashion: “around us the serfs, underfed, landless, less than people, dark wasted faces and dark rags fading into the dusk.” It was out of this darkness that Naipaul himself emerged, almost miraculously, transcending the impoverished background of his family, who had migrated to Trinidad in the late 19th century to work in indentured servitude on a plantation. It was there that Naipaul was born in 1932, to a poor but upper-caste father who aspired to be a writer and toiled in the shadow of his wife’s large extended family.



Naipaul’s rise from such meager, benighted circumstances astonished him more than anyone, and he returned to his unlikely coming-of-age story again and again.

Naipaul’s rise from such meager, benighted circumstances astonished him more than anyone, and he returned to his unlikely coming-of-age story again and again, in essays, speeches, non-fiction books, and novels that ranged from his 1961 breakthrough A House for Mr. Biswas to 2001’s Half a Life. The self-centered tilt of his writing, however, is also chalked up as a flaw. While memoir is a pillar of post-colonial literature, the repeated emphasis on his own story struck some as evidence of a monstrous egoism. As the editors of n+1 quipped, the “persistent implication” of Naipaul’s work is “that the only legitimate escape from ‘half-made’ post-colonial countries is to become V. S. Naipaul.”

It’s a clever line, with the bite of truth. (It stings doubly so because the sentiment is attributed to Salman Rushdie, who was once considered Naipaul’s competitor as the laureate of the post-colonial condition.) But is it really so far-fetched to connect Naipaul’s project of self-discovery—a lifelong effort to invent and re-invent himself—to the broader project of creating a post-colonial world? Underlying Naipaul’s work is a philosophy that, if anything, is even more relevant now than it was at the dawn of the post-colonial era. The world is harsh and unloving, but for Naipaul this is not an occasion for despair or resignation. Rather, it makes for a wisdom grounded in the hard truths: the world as it is, not the way we would like it to be.

Pankaj Mishra has observed that Naipaul’s work represents the “ironic reversal of the Conradian journey to the heart of darkness.” He sails out of a remote existence, clouded by myth and ignorance, into a clearer understanding of his life, his country, the world. “Each book is a new beginning, which dismantles what has gone before it,” Mishra writes. “This explains the endlessly replayed drama of arrival, and what seems an obsession with writerly beginnings, in Naipaul’s writings.”