The Trinidadian Naipaul he was a fascinating ethnographic storyteller. Whether in fiction or non-fiction, his destiny as a writer seemed determined to that semblance of peoples, especially those whose identity was removed. Peoples colonized, enslaved, dominated and subdued by their colonizers.
The voice, the imagination and the culture of so many peoples have been annihilated, which for Naipaul seemed to be a vital task.
This idea of colonized peoples as the main leitmotif in Naipaul's work leads me to think today. The current colonization as such tends to disappear, but another perhaps worse arrives, buried, that of the uniformity of multinationals, that of repeated consumption trends in scenarios around the world, such as a brutally colonizing starvation market.
Perhaps today the isolated peoples are the only ones who maintain their bases, their differences, their own personality... But that, as I would say Michael Ende, it's another story ...
The point is that reading Naipaul is an exercise in authentic anthropology. Something that is always fine in these times of admitted colonization.
Top 3 Recommended VS Naipaul Novels
A way in the world
The eternal dilemma about whether we can become something without knowing our past. It is not about remembering it but about knowing it, about knowing why our life was the way it was, why we learned to do things the way we do them.
All those little debts of our behavior are due to more than just memory. It is about knowing our way from the beginning to the end that we hope ...
Summary: A story of a writer's life journey toward understanding both the simple materials of heredity - language, character, family history - and the long, interwoven strands of a deeply complex historical past: «Things barely remembered , things that are only released through the act of writing. "
What Naipaul writes, what his release of memories allows us to see, is a series of unfolding and illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean.
Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator, who reinvents himself in order to escape the very story he longs to tell. With keen intelligence, Naipaul has created a monumental tale of recovered and reconstructed identity.
A zone of darkness
Naipaul presents us with this fiction in which he also ends up looking for his Indian roots, the ones that his parents transmitted to him in their genes.
Summary: From the chaos of Bombay to the unfading beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred frozen cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple in Madras, Naipaul discovers an astonishing variety of human types, modest civil servants and arrogant servants; a devious holy man and a fascinated American in search of faith.
Naipaul also exposes his personal and different reaction to the crippling caste system, to the seemingly serene acceptance of poverty and misery, and the conflict between a desire for self-determination and a nostalgia for British rule.
En A zone of darkness shape, next to India, after a million riots (Pocket 2011) e India: a wounded civilization, his acclaimed trilogy about India. My India was not like that of the English or the British. My India was full of pain. Some sixty years earlier my ancestors had made the very long journey from India to the Caribbean, of at least six weeks, and although it was hardly talked about when I was little, as I got older it began to worry me more and more.
So despite being a writer, I wasn't going to Forster's or Kipling's India. I was going to an India that only existed in my head ... »
The loss of gold
Probably one of the most notorious colonizing processes was that of America by Spain first and the rest of Europe later.
The ambition before the discovery of unknown lands aroused cruelties, abuses and a supremacist will to impose the truth on the inhabitants of the new world.
Summary: VS Naipaul masterfully tells us the little great history of his native island, Trinidad, which since the time of the Conquest was the starting point for Spanish expeditions in search of the mythical City of Gold and a combat territory for ambitions colonial England, which would not stop until it seized power in the area taking advantage of the wars of independence of the Spanish colonies.
