V. S. Naipaul's Journeys: From Periphery to Center

by Sanjay Krishnan , Ph.D.

Overview

The author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) is one of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most controversial. Before settling in England, Naipaul grew up in Trinidad in an Indian immigrant community, and his depiction of colonized peoples has often been harshly judged by critics as unsympathetic, misguided, racist, and sexist. Yet other readers praise his work as containing uncommonly perceptive historical and psychological insight.

In V. S. Naipaul’s Journeys, Sanjay Krishnan offers new perspectives on the distinctiveness and power of Naipaul’s writing, as well as his shortcomings, trajectory, and complicated legacy. While recognizing the flaws and prejudices that shaped and limited Naipaul’s life and art, this book challenges the binaries that have dominated discussions of his writing. Krishnan reads Naipaul as self-subverting and self-critical, engaged in describing his own implication in what he saw as the malaise of the postcolonial world. Krishnan brings together close readings of major novels with considerations of Naipaul’s work as a united project, as well as nuanced assessments of Naipaul’s political commentary on ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Krishnan provides a Naipaul for contemporary times, illustrating how his life and work shed light on debates regarding migration, diversity, sectarianism, displacement, and other global challenges.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231193320
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	02/04/2020
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Sanjay Krishnan is professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia (Columbia, 2007).

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Introduction
I. Early Writings: 1955–1961
1. Memories of Underdevelopment: Miguel Street; The Middle Passage
2. Self and Society: The Suffrage of Elvira; A House for Mr Biswas
II. The Middle Period: 1962–1980
3. Historical Identities: The Middle Passage; An Area of Darkness
4. Fantasy and Derangement: The Loss of El Dorado; India: A Wounded Civilization; “Michael X and the Killings in Trinidad”
5. Ambiguous Freedom: “In a Free State”
6. Truth and Lie: A Bend in the River
III. Late Works: 1981–2010
7. Productive Deformation: The Enigma of Arrival
8. Landscapes of the Mind: India: A Million Mutinies Now
9. Conversations with the Faithful: Among the Believers; Beyond Belief
10. Concluding Reflections: Half a Life; Magic Seeds; The Masque of Africa
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

11/18/2019

Krishnan (Reading the Global), an associate English professor at Boston University, devotes this insightful analysis to postcolonial themes in the work of the late novelist V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018). A divisive figure, Naipaul won the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, but was also described by detractors as a “troll,” who would periodically “feed the media with soundbites... calculated to provoke outrage,” such as disparaging comments about India, from which his grandparents had emigrated. Krishnan does not attempt to explain away the troublesome aspects of Naipaul’s worldview , but instead understand how Naipaul’s experiences with racial tensions while growing up in Trinidad’s Indian immigrant community informed his writing. Krishnan quotes Naipaul as writing in The Enigma of Arrival, “My subject was not my sensibility... but the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in.” Krishnan offers nuanced and careful readings of Naipaul’s major works, with a particular focus on Naipaul’s 1979 Africa-set masterpiece, A Bend in the River. Krishnan sees it as a chronicle of postcolonial pragmatism in which the protagonist, Salim, much like Naipaul, incorporates the West’s view of other cultures as “exotic” and inferior into his own worldview as a way to deal with and manipulate dominant Western cultures. Krishnan’s jargon-free study will prove invaluable to serious readers and Naipaul scholars alike. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Krishnan deftly navigates the ideological maelstrom that swirls around Naipaul’s reputation to deliver a fully grounded reappraisal of the relationship between the author’s work, his biography, and his political moment. This study sets new parameters for evaluating Naipaul's literary legacy.

Rhonda Cobham-Sander

Krishnan argues persuasively that the way Naipaul used his own life story and experiences, including his interactions with the people he met on his travels, enabled him to create 'an original form of postcolonial writing'…the importance of his nuanced approach to Naipaul’s life and work cannot be overstated.

Transnational Literature - Gillian Dooley

Krishnan suggests that Naipaul’s ambiguous ironies mean he can never be read as simply for or against the colonized. What is uniquely insightful about Naipaul’s work is, this book argues, intimately connected to what is most problematic about it.

Times Literary Supplement

In V. S. Naipaul's Journeys, Sanjay Krishnan argues that Naipaul should be understood not as a reactionary critic of postcolonial cultures, but as someone who reported on them from the inside. Krishnan’s conclusions will be debated for a while to come, but his rigorous engagement with Naipaul’s oeuvre will reanimate the author for the next generation of critics.

Suvir Kaul

Drawing heavily on archival materials made available only recently, V. S. Naipaul's Journeys: From Periphery to Center offers a defense and rereading of Naipaul by substantially reframing the objectives of his writing. Naipaul's work is unlike that of other postcolonial writers, contends Krishnan, in avoiding both easy position taking and the consolations of identity. Accessing Naipaul’s “ways of seeing,” Krishnan gives us a new, self-subverting Naipaul for the twenty-first century.

Timothy Bewes

In demonstrating how Naipaul’s work attends to multiple viewpoints and undoes the search for a master narrative about the postcolonial Caribbean, V. S. Naipaul's Journeys contributes a comprehensive, meticulously researched, and insightful new study of a life and a literary corpus.

Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry - Sarah Jilani

A bold and comprehensive reading of the controversial writer...highly recommended.

Choice

V. S. Naipaul's Journeys is an immensely valuable contribution. It is one of the best synthetic treatments of Naipaul's work available. It deftly blends a discussion of Naipaul's various journeys with Naipaul's own journey as a writer. It refocuses our attention on Naipaul's texts in order to reveal the development of his thinking.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta

In Sanjay Krishnan’s excellent study...we follow two parallel but counter-directional trajectories: that of the writer’s life—‘from periphery to centre’, as the book’s subtitle has it—and that of the work—which took the writer back from the imperial centre of the world to the peripheral societies that he was perpetually drawn to.

Literary Activism - Vineet Gill