A Writer’s People
My review of Naipaul’s latest appeared in the Sunday Indian (Oct 15-21). An excerpt:
In [A Writer’s People], Naipaul is reading and writing only in the way a novelist can. In two brief but beautiful paragraphs, he presents a portrait of contrasting ambitions. First, Balzac’s Rastignac on a hill at evening above the cemetery of Paris. Rastignac stands overlooking the ‘hive’ of the famous city, and vows to taste its honey on his lips. Then, Gandhi in South Africa. The Indian leader, Naipaul writes, “has no idea of the unbearable beauty of the hostile city.” He only has “small, manageable political aims.” As he matures, his vision widens, and the nature of his rebellion grows. Writes Naipaul, “His politics becomes indistinguishable from his spirituality. There has never been any taste of honey on his lips.”
But the more indelible images come from Naipaul’s own past. At his grandmother’s house in Trinidad, back in 1944 or 1945, there was a Hindi-speaking mattress-maker who had come from India, perhaps one of the last recruits under the system of indentureship. A young Naipaul (twelve- or thirteen-year-old) wanted to know the man’s story and hear from him about India.
He writes, “I tried to make my questions as small as possible. I asked what he remembered most about India. He thought about it for some time and said, ‘There was a railway station.’ That was all I could get out of him.”
Several pages later Naipaul returns to the mattress-maker: “He would not have had the means to tell me about India. He could think only about the biggest and most modern thing he remembered: the railway station. He would have been separate, culturally far away, from his children. He was as solitary as he appeared.”
This is a part of the book’s argument. Experience is not enough; you also need words. Words by themselves aren’t sufficient either, of course. You need ways of seeing and feeling.
