V.S. Naipaul: The Grief and the Glory

‘I’ll read it with great interest,’ V.S. Naipaul said, as he took the bound proof of my first novel in his hands and peered up at me with a mixture of alarm and fatigue. Then Naipaul’s wife, Nadira, ushered me out the door of their Wiltshire cottage, suggesting that we take a walk. I was acutely aware that I was moving through the landscape of one of my favourite Naipaul books, The Enigma of Arrival – hills and downs, and ‘flat wet fields, with the ditches as water meadows’. Beyond lay a narrow river, the Avon (not Shakespeare’s Avon), on whose swirling glassy surface, a black swan would occasionally glide by. Naipaul’s life there was hard won. He had grown up in colonial Trinidad, where his north Indian family had been sent as indentured labourers by the British, a practice that continued long after the abolition of slavery in 1834. He had come from that ‘dot on the map’ to Oxford on a scholarship in 1950. The twenty years that lay between what he described as ‘the blackness’ of his ... Read full article.