SOURCE: “Displaced Person,” in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 11, December 30, 1971, pp. 3-4.

In the following review of In a Free State, Kazin calls the book one of Naipaul's best and illustrates how the short stories within the work give voice to Naipaul's major themes of displacement, exile, and homelessness.

This is an extraordinarily penetrating book and a disturbing one. One could well praise the original and powerful novelist behind it by describing the reason for the disturbance—nor would this minimize the disturbance in the least.

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, to which his grandfather had come from India; he completed his very English education at Oxford. After seven books of fiction and three works of nonfiction, most of them dealing by one stratagem or another with the interrelationships between the West Indies, England, and Africa first made clear to him by the...