A Writer's People

Naipaul's book is a pleasant, sometimes repetitive, hodgepodge of memoir, thoughts on books and writers, and reflections on history, especially India's. Simon Vance, who is highly skilled and experienced, narrates with intelligence, nuance, and feeling (sometimes just a bit too much feeling or emphasis). His very professionalism, oddly, calls attention to the fact that this is not the author reading these first-person observations. Vance's English accent, unlike Naipaul's, has no flavor of the Caribbean, or even the subcontinent. Even one who has never heard Naipaul, just from hearing his personal history, may find this reading, while technically nearly impeccable, actorly, bland, and inauthentic. But barring a personal reading, this is the best one can reasonably expect. W.M. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

March 31, 2008
The fascinating but not fully satisfying new book by Nobel prize-winner Naipaul is a curious collection. These five nonfiction pieces have no thematic through-line or argument, wandering instead through pockets of memoir, literary criticism, history and gossip. Naipaul is well-versed for this type of journey, as his past forays into fiction, travel writing and autobiography have proven, and his ability to thoroughly engage with both the stylistic flaws of Flaubert’s novel Salammbô
and an early biography of Gandhi within the space of a few pages is both illuminating and impressive. One of the loose organizing themes of the book is Naipaul’s relationships with other writers and books, a subject on which he expounds fully and often with more than a touch of spite. In “An English Way of Looking,” on the British writer Anthony Powell, a good friend during Naipaul’s early years in London, Naipaul criticizes Powell’s writing unrelentingly, then paints extraordinarily unflattering portraits of Auberon Waugh and Phillip Larkin as punishment for their criticism of Powell. Nonetheless, Naipaul’s latest offers an honest portrait of a major international writer’s perspective from late in life.