SOURCE: Shankar, S. “Naipaul Writes Home.” Nation 270, no. 8 (28 February 2000): 23-6.

In the following review, Shankar commends Between Father and Son for the insight it provides into Naipaul's personality and family life and asserts that the collection “is a revelation when it comes to the narrative possibilities in the compilation of letters.”

Many years ago, when I was about the age that V. S. Naipaul was when he departed Trinidad for England, I would borrow books by him from the library of an erstwhile colonial club in Kuala Lumpur. In a building constructed during the time of the British, A House for Mr. Biswas sat on a shelf whose other books were mostly by writers like Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling. Thinking back now, it seems to me both incongruous and fitting that Naipaul—to the best of my recollection pretty much the only writer not European or North...