I have often wondered to myself about the immigrants from India that invariably own every convenience store and motel in the area where I live in America. “What is it they take in, or feel, about this crazy country, the USA of 2017? How do they go about their day encountering the myriad races and behavior patterns that they, as merchants, must encounter on a daily basis? How do they process all this democratic splendor, coming from a country and civilization so distant in every way, including geographically, to their own?”

According to V.S. Naipaul in “Literary Occasions” – not much.

In his essay “Indian Autobiographies,” Naipaul muses on the same point: “The dereliction of India overwhelms the visitor, and it seems reasonable to inquire that the Indian who leaves his country. . . for the first time is likely to be unsettled. But in Indian autobiographies there is no hint of unsettlement: people are their designations and functions, and places little more than their names.” (139) He marvels at Gandhi’s lack of observation upon seeing London for the first time. “A place is its name,” he explains.

Naipaul was moved to investigate his distinctly jumbled background – an East Indian from the West Indies – and produced a body of work that tells us much about the jarring effects that the moving of populations around the world has produced. “Literary Occasions” is a collection of essays that goes far in explaining Naipaul’s admittedly “baffling” place in the literary world.

Naipaul’s viewpoint is always that of the outsider, for it is very few outside his native Trinidad that understand such a background and how it has led to his rather detached observations of the world around him. “To be Latin American or Greek American is to be known, to be a type, and therefore in some way established. To be an Indian or East Indian from the West Indies is to be a perpetual surprise to people outside the region.” (38)

His father, a journalist in Trinidad and a budding fiction writer, had a literary bent and it was his literary yearnings that were to impact a young V.S. Naipaul, stirring in him a romantic image of being a writer and living the literary life. He relates his years-long difficulty in finding his own voice as a writer after moving to England and attending Oxford on a government sponsored scholarship. It is a Port of Spain neighbor from his childhood, one Bogart, that finally gives Naipaul his own literary breakthrough. (Naipaul’s story of finally finding this neighbor years later is truly compelling). Mining his own past, however reluctantly, led to his first novel “Miguel Street,” and Naipaul was to find that this initial inspiration from the ethnically confused environment of his youth was enough to get him going on a long, and as he emphasizes, laborious literary career.

Naipaul finds a like-mind in Joseph Conrad, who also was attracted to writing about “half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made.” (170) And I must interject to say that I took some solace in Naipaul finding Conrad “impenetrable” after I unsuccessfully tried to seriously re-read “Heart of Darkness” a few years back. As Naipaul says: “It isn’t always easy to know what is being explained.” (166) Yes!

Naipaul bemoans his own people’s lack of curiosity as immigrants in Trinidad, living in their own way and by their own rules brought over from their native land. (So much for the notion of ‘assimilation’ that serves as such a palliative notion in today’s world.) “We looked inwards; we lived out our days; the world outside existed in a kind of darkness; we inquired about nothing.” (187)

In researching the Chaguanes region of Trinidad where Naipaul lived as a youth, he visited the British Museum, making inquiries his forbears never did. He finds a letter from the King of Spain written to the governor of Trinidad regarding the “nation of Indians” that had proved to be some problem in the agricultural colony. Here Naipaul has an epiphany of sorts: “And the thought came to me in the museum that I was the first person since 1625 to whom that letter of the King of Spain had a real meaning.” (185)

It was Naipaul’s yearning to know more about the place where he grew up (when nobody else seemed to care) that is emblematic of his whole career. The information about where he had lived, useless to so many, was treasured by him. “Literary Occasions,” especially the Nobel Lecture “Two Worlds” that appears at the end of the book, offers a summing up of what has made Naipaul one of the most revered, and to some unsettling, literary figures of our time.

boring. slow moving. moreover I didn't like his criticism of Rk Narayan, for his writings revolving around a village.

A gift from a friend about 7-8 years ago

At first I thought of Aristotle's "Poetics", then I did not know what to think as the author seemed to be indulging in a lot of self analysis. I guess his comments about being a colonial from a place of little or no consequence were insightful. I believe that he was overstepping with regard to some of his interpretations of the thoughts and actions of others. His seemingly never ending discussion of Indian authors certainly affirmed my ignorance. Perhaps a writer needs to dissect the work of other writers so he/she can improve. However, I just could not get into his discussion and analysis of Conrad. I think a reading of the first essay and then skipping to the last , the last being his Nobel Prize speech, might be a good idea. Of course one must remember that this is a compendium of works selected from the author's many offerings before assigning any point of view with this book.

"Momentos literarios" es la trayectoria de Naipaul como escritor, a través de textos que forman parte de discursos o relatos que hablan de más escritores, en quienes se inspiró y quienes de alguna manera lo formaron.
Textos para ir tomando nota de títulos y autores para agregar a la lista de libros pendientes.

This was my second book for the Read Harder 2015 reading challenge as a book written by someone when they were over the age of 65. The book is rightly reviewed as "An engaging guide to the writing life, full of interest for the would-be novelist". More so for me as I relate to the darkness around his childhood about his own history that he writes about. And how this later helped him find his subjects for his initial works.

"Everything of value about me is in my books"

Regardless of his merit as an individual, V.S. Naipaul was undeniably a genius. On a personal level I find that he wrote some of my favorite books and travelogues. His work has had a lasting impact on me and I'd argue that it makes anyone who can absorb it a better writer. Having said that, Naipaul also wrote a lot in his life and perhaps not all of it really deserved to be published. This set of essays published around the time he won his Nobel Prize is an utterly tedious collection of writing that succeeds at being repetitive without coalescing around any memorable idea. Naipaul somehow manages to slide his blinkered anti-Muslim polemics about India into otherwise self-absorbed essays about the minutiae of living as a struggling writer in London. Several of the essays go over the same details again and again of his family history in Trinidad and his thoughts about gaining writerly success. This is Naipaul at his most unbearable.

The high-water mark of the whole book is Pankaj Mishra's introductory article. It's all downhill from there. Everyone should read Naipaul, in my opinion. But you're better off sticking to his most famous works and not going too far off the beaten path.

"I didn’t feel competent as a reader until I was twenty-five."

From what I have read about him, Naipaul is a harsh person, so I approached this cautiously, but I found his prose thoroughly enjoyable, although I have currently shelved his fiction writing. I was interested in his perceptions as an outsider, an Indian immigrant in Trinidad, and then later as an immigrant to England on scholarship. In this I was completely gratified, as I felt it worked the empathy muscles extensively, expressed in clear prose.

Got half way through this. It’s going nowhere and Naipul makes an irksome narrator. Reads as if he wrote it in about two weeks and never bothered to edit. Already repetitive and not particularly “intellectual”, as the blurb boasts. Eh.

I read 8 essays.