Critical Essay | Critical Review by Richard Eder

SOURCE: "The Root of Rootlessness," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 22, 1994, pp. 3, 11.

In the following review, Eder argues that by "refusing to conceal or temper his own crabby vision," Naipaul achieves a "unique authenticity" in his A Way in the World.

The word Caribbean may conjure up all kinds of vivid colors, but to V. S. Naipaul it suggests gray: a land and seascape bleached out by unmediated sun and a counterfeit history. It is the gray in the face of a professional entertainer the morning after a late night.

The displacing and alienating effects of a colonial past on today's post-colonial peoples has been Naipaul's leading theme ever since, once past his early Trinidad novels, he broke through the colors to the gray underneath. He has pursued it in his fiction and nonfiction, set in Britain, Africa, South America and India, the home of...
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