V.S. Naipaul is a wonderful author. No one disguises his biases better. He simply records observations. Only at a few key points will he more than hint at a his personal response. Still his sensibility comes - and it is strange to observe that in spite of the subtlety one knows that he's not got a gentle edge.

This is a collection of essays I read and owned several years ago. I wanted to re-read his bits on Argentina and the Ivory Coast, but found him again so readable I went ahead and re-read everything but the essays on India.

text #1: how to observe.

Naipaul travels the world and gives us a slice of history along the way in his own
inimitable style

el autor, se dedicó 40 años a escribir estos ensayos.
no es una lectura fácil, es bastante densa pero no por eso menos fascinante.

con mucha postura política, lenguaje irónico a ratos y un ojo muy crítico nos relata la historia de civilizaciones alrededor del mundo, historia antigua, o quizas no tanto. Nos hace reflexionar sobre como a pesar de los avances significativos, algunas cosas cambian muy poco.

destaco los ensayos sobre India, una lectura obligatoria.

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Interesting collection of essays by Naipaul. I liked the ones about India (many parallels with other regions such add Latin America), the one about Argentina, and some of the African themed ones. The one about the republican convention in Dallas could have been written yesterday.

This is not a bad collection of essays. To be sure, this book is not as good as it thinks it is, but this a common problem. Naipaul as a writer is someone who was very certainly overpraised, seeing as he approached life with a solemn air, had a fondness for making everything political and in having a certain strident sort of leftist political perspective that plays well among cosmopolitans who think themselves above tradition and above arrogance. There are few so unrighteous and arrogant as those who think themselves to be above arrogance, who look down on Christianity and religion in general but think themselves to be united across borders and across boundaries in love. The fact that the author is a hypocrite with little taste for irony, largely because he takes himself too seriously, does detract considerably from the message he is trying to get across. Yet the author's fondness for victim tales and his extreme self-seriousness and lack of a sense of the absurdity of life or of his own flaws that prevent him from making the world a better place than he found it, while they do detract some from the enjoyment of this work, provide a separate level of enjoyment for those who are fond of absurdity and irony, and that is enjoyment enough to make aspects of this work worth reading, even if the book as a whole is a bit of a slog.

This book is a hefty one at more than 500 pages, and a book with this much physical weight and mass deserves to show some sort of progress in the mind of the person who traveled and wrote without seeming to see what was going on, making the praise that the author has received from the intellectual world somewhat strange, as if they could not see his blind spots because they mirrored their own. The first part of this book contains some essays on India, and these predictably discuss matters of politics and the author's own background, most notably in "The Election In Ajmer," where the author is one of several people whose political insights are limited. The second part of the section looks at Africa and the African diaspora, where he comments on the black power killings in Trinidad, Mobuto as King of the Congo, examines the crocodiles of the artificial capital Yamoussoukro along with some trenchant observations about the fate of black West Indians who return to Africa as wives of native African men, as well as the economic troubles of Mauritus. The third and final section of the book then explores America, including the author's experiences with Norman Mailer, some criticism of Europeans and the nature of power, the author's lack of respect for the Republicans in the 1984 convention, a clueless look at the crisis of Grenada, and the author's thinking of the revolution in Guyana, after which there is a postscript on the author's universalist thinking, and an index.

One of the more tragic aspects of this book is the way that the author does not appear to have learned very much about the problems of leftist politics over the course of decades as a writer. Over and over again the author goes to a country and explores its politics and writes as if things will be different this time, as if one could follow the idiocy of socialism and end up with anything other than a disaster for one's country. While it is no doubt true that the author's status as a fellow traveler of sorts made it easy for him to go to places like Granada and the Ivory Coast and Congo, he appears not to have come to any insights about why it is that socialism fails and why it is that intellectuals like himself make such terrible rulers. It is one thing for a writer like this to fail to appreciate the wit of a Jane Austen. That is, while lamentable, certainly easy enough to understand. What is unpardonable in a book like this composed of political essays is that the author cannot apparently recognize the insights of a George Orwell, whose directness and honesty would have given the author insights that he could not learn from decades at watching the failure of nations and blaming neocolonialism for the failure of the political systems he held so dear.

A good collection of essays from 1962 up to the early 90s. Naipaul shows why he was both a great prose stylist and an acute observer of politics and human foibles.

Naipaul is lowkey racist but writes great

V.S. Naipaul was as vicious a critic of postcolonial societies as any writer of the 20th century. Part of the reason that Naipaul's critiques sting so much, for me at least, is that he himself was the child of impoverished Trinidad. Unlike so many other people who have had "literary careers," Naipaul did not come from wealth, privilege or prestige. He was a Hindu man of Indian extraction who grew up in one of the poorest and most remote parts of a decaying British empire, at a time of overt prejudice against people like him. Through his great gifts, he somehow made the most of these unpromising beginnings. In doing so never let the people he grew up with off the hook. To the contrary, Naipaul knew very well the secret pathologies of us brown and black people, the global proletariat of popular imagination, and let everyone know about them, even to the point of exaggeration.

In this book of essays, Naipaul travels across India, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, South America and even the southern United States, giving a kind of ad-hoc world tour. Normally I am not a fan of books of essays, but somehow these otherwise disjointed travel dispatches tie together quite well. I suspect they manage to fit together because the writings and reflections in each one are absolutely striking. Naipaul is as gifted a writer of English as anyone I've ever read. More so than many others — Christopher Hitchens comes again to mind — Naipaul lives up to the hype around him. His writing is so powerful that the aesthetics of the book transform from a mere ornament into something like the main attraction. He paints such a vivid picture of the places and peoples he visits, that he acutely made me want to visit Maldives, St. Kitts and Argentina, countries that I hadn't thought deeply about before.

Suffice to say that Naipaul was a raging pessimist when it came to the developing world. The picture he paints of all the countries he visits in this book (save for the United States) is one of unrelenting fatalism and decay, punctuated by bouts of hysteria. If I were a British or French official reading these essays in the 1960s and feeling angst about my recently lost empire, I'm sure I'd derive some comfort from these dispatches. Naipaul has never met a postcolonial country that he hasn't experienced as a lurid phantasmagoria of violence, mysticism, melancholy, corruption or disorientation. In retrospect his judgment of the supposedly doomed nature of these societies was too harsh. It would also be described as racist by today's standards, when the people who live in these places have developed voices to speak back.

Naipaul does have an undeniable point though when it comes to the legacy of imperialism. Far-flung places like St. Kitts and Nevis and the Maldives were formed as minor economic appendages to empires. Once the empires that created them crumbled away, the places no longer made any sense. In the absence of the metropole many people in the former imperium have been left confused and drifting, unsure to do with the massive institutional and physical detritus that was left to them. As we have seen many times and in many places, the void created by the lost metropole has often been filled by military rule, monarchical despotism, or worse.

Even India seems hopeless in Naipaul's appraisals, which date from the 1970s. He seemed to have been quite wrong in condemning that country to fatal backwardness, which is ironic given that he also later on expressed sympathies with Hindutva ideology, perhaps drawn to it by his own Brahmin background. His famous antipathy towards Islam comes out strikingly in his last essay, which, unlike the rest of the book, is actually a speech that he delivered to a conservative New York think tank in 1992. That speech about "Our Universal Civilization" also seems to strongly reflect Hindu nationalist beliefs about Muslims across the world being merely colonized Arabs of the mind. This address reflected a remarkable ignorance and superficiality of thinking. It also made me wonder how blinkered his other political views were, about places and subjects that I don't know as well.

Naipaul should be read with an alert skepticism, not unthinking acceptance. With that caveat though, I would say that he's one of the most brilliant writers I've ever read. He is an absolutely scathing critic, a kind of intimate enemy, of the recently emancipated peoples of the Third World. I personally find its better to be criticized — even criticized unfairly — and kept alert and tenacious as a result, rather than being lulled into complacency by condescending praise. Naipaul was a legitimate genius, and I can see now why he has had such a massive psychological impact on so many Asian and African writers. I'll certainly continue reading his vast corpus of books. Even if his politics ultimately fail, he was one of the greatest travel writers ever and every chapter he penned still feels like a mini-vacation.

Muy interesantes los ensayos de este escritor. Descubres por qué no ha triunfado nada en ciertos países y que hay lugares que fueron, son y serán muy difíciles de arreglar porque sus creencias antiguas y sus fanatismos los llevan a terminar en dictaduras opresoras. La historia y las políticas no cambian. Entiendo que Naipaul se llevara el Nobel de Literatura en 2001. Chapeau por su valentía al narrar la realidad de lugares tan problemáticos y gobernados por gentes muy peligrosas.

Naipaul travels and writes giving a whole lot of insight from all the corners of the world. Wherever he goes he seems to have a way of finding out the just how the past influences the current and what have gone wrong and what will go wrong. Whether in India, Trinidad, Ivory Coast or Argentina. Not always an easy read of course, I found myself struggling on some of the longer essays. Some of these essays are written a long time ago. Especially the ones in India that regards certain events and politicians that are now almost 50 years back in time and no matter how well Naipaul writes I just have a hard time knowing just what do with them. I found the book most fascinating when you could tell how he used some of the experiences from his travels later on in his fictional books. Like how Michael X and Gale Benson from the commune in Trinidad appears in Guerillas or how he describes using a certain feeling he got from the dirty wars in Argentina but putting it in a African setting for A Bend In The River.

Is there anything cooler than a short essay on Yamoussoukro by a bitter old man? No there isnt