VS Naipaul departs, leaving a legacy that reflects, in its melange, wondrous worlds known and unknown, lived and untried, and explored and unmitigated by his readers.
A writer who became a part of my journey through the pages he vicariously took me along in his early works of fiction, remains dear for those accounts. In those words of fiction, lay truths of lands and longings that gave his craft, credence. These hard truths, entwined with other assimilations of birth and descent, reflected worlds that fascinated and stoked the initiated and not, alike.
I am in a quandry, though, with his commentaries. There is a lot of dark disdain and a disconnection typical to those who left before India became what it is today. A lot comes from obvious disappointments of lost lands and what was lost with them, and despair at what can be seen today - this seems true of the Trinidad and Tobago narrative as well.
To have consistently moved away from his ethnic origins into more convenient idioms of growth and furtherance (his previous generation to Trinidad and he himself to London), takes away the moral ground for any expert opinion on the here-and-now realities that are steeped in a past whose resultant chiselings he understood little of. Having been distant from the process of time in these parts, his comprehension of what he saw, was only as the outsider, at best. Unfortunately, he had been out too long.
Such derision, in fiction, would have created greater art. But in commentary, it raises the question of gratitude and credit, because it is these very subjects of personal disappointment that propped his fabulous art.
While I remain a fan of his craft, and I realise this critique should have come off the dust of the last cover of An Area of Darkness after I read it back then, and not now as I attempt to celebrate the greatness of VS Naipaul, I am struggling with the distance between what he critiqued and where he stood. But that is just my opinion, which I also realise, does not come across in the least, as humble. That is unintentional.
And so, for the joys of reading that only a Naipaulian adventure could deliver, for the nuances of character and depth only his plots could sketch, and indeed, for the imagination only such exotic settings can evoke, I most humbly submit my respects to this great pen of our times. In honour of his canon from the lands and times of his growing-up years and the allure and mystique that richly embellish those works, Sir VS Naipaul, will be remembered, with love.
Rest in peace, Sir.
Comments