A Nobel laureate's enigma of achievement

This, he said, is a product of his background "" his double displaced status, and the anxiety that accompanies it. A reading of Naipaul's shorter pieces along with his longer works of fiction both helps one understand his writing better and puts his work in perspective.

However, it is hard to agree with his statement that each of his works of fiction grew out of what preceded it. Rather, each is an autonomous construct, not necessarily better than the last one.

Literary Occasions is a collection of 11 essays about reading, writing and identity, written at different points of time. The essays are not arranged chronologically.

The opening essay, 'Reading and Writing,' provides a context, and the collection closes with Naipaul's Nobel Lecture which is a recounting of his growth as a writer and his achievements as he sees them.

In his introductory essay, Pankaj Mishra makes several points, the most significant one being Naipaul's fragmented perceptions, which are a result of a fragmented identity that afflict most people who are displaced and who find it difficult to relate to either their place of origin or their place of adoption.

It is easier to pose as an exile in one's adopted country, something that the late Edward Said did and Naipaul has been doing so for quite a long time now.

This is not to detract from the merit of Naipaul's prose or the insight in his writings, both of which can be discerned by the discriminating reader. In 'Reading and Writing' Naipaul talks about certain aspects of his writing that have been problematic for the reader.

His attitude towards India in his first book on this country, An Area of Darkness, is a case in point. Only recently, Naipaul has attempted to explain his sharp reactions in the course of his first visit and it becomes evident that they are the product of a conflict between the India of his racial memory glossed with nostalgia and the vast physicality of this country, which he found difficult to come to terms with.

V S Naipaul published his first work of fiction The Mystic Masseur in 1957. He went on to publish other works of fiction but never wrote about himself or factors that influenced him and his writing till about 30 years later in an essay titled 'Prologue to an Autobiography'.

This essay, included in the book under review, reveals aspects of Naipaul's writing that help readers understand his fiction, his deep anxieties, his desperate desire to succeed. His father Seepersad Naipaul, a journalist with the Trinidad Guardian, was talented but success always eluded him.

In his Foreword to The Adventures of Gurudeva, a collection of stories written by his father, Naipaul says that writers need a source of strength other than what they find in their talent, something that has for its source the society they live in and the kind of encouragement and support it can provide.

This, Naipaul feels, is the main reason his father did not succeed. In his words, "The writer begins with his talent, finds confidence in his talent, but then discovers that it isn't enough, that, in a society as deformed as ours, by the exercise of his talent he has set himself adrift."

Naipaul's response to other writers has always been subjective. His contemptuous references to James Joyce's blindness and Forester's homosexuality are often held against him. Among the essays on other writers in this book 'Theatrical Natives' takes up Kipling.

Though Naipaul concedes that in Kipling's later writings, his prose "... was to become a superb instrument of narration, concise, full of flavour and speed, and wonderfully pictorial," he is dismissive of him, terming him a "club-writer" who could best be savoured in a group of stories.

"Conrad's Darkness and Mine" is a more intense piece of writing. Reading Conrad's works makes him realise certain things about his self. An oft quoted observation: "To be a colonial was to know a certain kind of security; it was to inherit a fixed world."

Pankaj Mishra, the editor, deserves a word of commendation for his selection of essays in this book. However, the introduction could have been more elaborate, considering that Mishra has worked extensively on Naipaul.

LITERARY OCCASIONS ESSAYS

V S Naipaul

Introduced and edited by

Pankaj Mishra

Picador

Pages: xvi + 202/

Special Indian price: Rs 395