Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John L. Brown

SOURCE: "V. S. Naipaul: A Wager on the Triumph of Darkness," in World Literature Today, Vol. 57, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 223-27.

In the following essay, Brown praises Naipaul's skill as a novelist, focusing on his "dark" vision of the world.

V.S. Naipaul has traveled far since his Trinidad beginnings. He was born there in 1932, a third-generation West Indian of Hindu ancestry. His father, a reporter with literary ambitions, encouraged his son to study and write. Even as a very young man Naipaul was determined to get away from the narrow, neocolonial world of his birth. At eighteen he left for England, took an Oxford degree, worked for the BBC, began to write. With his early stories of West Indian life he received immediate recognition from British critics as the most talented of contemporary Caribbean writers. He was covered with prestigious English literary prizes, four of them in...
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