SOURCE: "Con Men and Conquerors," in The New York Times Book Review, May 22, 1994, pp. 1, 42-3.

In the following review, Staples praises A Way in the World, calling it a "probing meditation on the relationships among personal, national and world histories."

Few writers of V. S. Naipaul's stature have been so consistently and aggressively misread on account of ethnic and racial literary politics. Much of the criticism stems not from what Mr. Naipaul writes but from expectations about what he ought to write given that he is a brown man (of Indian descent) born into the brown and black society that is Trinidad. Alas, after a 40-year voyage as a writer, Mr. Naipaul has arrived at a time when his work is too often viewed through the filter of race. This would be an impoverished way of seeing in any case. In V. S. Naipaul's case, a strictly racial...