I haven’t read a lot of Naipaul’s fiction. I read Guerillas a few years ago. I have often tried to read one of his more popular novels, A House for Mr Biswas but without much progress. When fiction is set in or around India, I find it difficult to access. Usually, fiction carves this new space where you step in and think through characters based in other times and other places, mostly distant, which, fiction set in current times or about India does not provide.
I read Naipaul’s essay collection,
Literary Occasions sometime late last year. This is the writer talking about his
making, about the years that formed him, about his early days, about the
perceptions he has collected of growing up as a person of Indian origin in a foreign place which was still called Indies by another name. The collection also
includes a couple of forewords to his books. It is an enjoyable collection, worth a re-read. There is the struggle and joy of him becoming a writer, and there's his joy as a reader as he takes us through his reading influences.
There are certain writers where their worldview seems to run like an identifiable thread running through their work,
easy to be picked, a theme or a memory, and sometimes making it difficult to draw the lines between
their memoirs and fiction. I have felt that while reading books by Marquez and in his autobiography. Similarly in Naipaul's writing, there's a recurring theme of him being a perpetual
outsider. Most of his essays seemed to return to the theme of his struggle with reconciling the world that is and the world that he sees given his contexts.
Around the same time as I was reading
Naipaul, we watched Gandhi (or re-watched it to introduce the movie to the kid as he wrote his essays on modern and historical heroes).
And for me, the dawning epiphany was in finding a similar theme in Gandhi -
that Gandhi’s views, thoughts and approaches to the world were shaped elsewhere
(and not in India) and he arrived in India fairly fully formed, which might seem obvious,
but not so to me so far given the way history is taught or written in India. He brought his outsider views to India and saw things differently.
Zadie
Smith
One of
the last books I read in 2019 was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I have come across her essays and have loved reading them.
I read it
like a page-turner for most parts, but in terms of overall thoughts, I think I favour her essays over fiction. Similar to my discomfort with reading books set in India, books set too close in time do not let the longer, historical arcs to settle down that tend to form the background to a good
reading experience.
Another thought that it brought up - although White Teeth charts people from different immigrant cultures, I felt somehow it didn't fully bridge the gap of seeing through two points. Unlike, say
the authors who’ve grown up and lived in two different cultures and who write from
inside those cultures. Perhaps it is just the way I feel, but the first-generation
immigrants seem to work with a richer palette than some of the second-generation writers. Thoughts not fully formed, but something which appears to me as I read from say Rushdie, to Naipaul to Zadie Smith. Looking forward to reading Quchiotte in the near future once K finishes reading it.
Meanwhile, I continue to read Zadie Smith's essays. Hoping to read through her collection of occasional essays soon.