In a 1994 interview with John F. Baker, V. S. Naipaul said: “I'd like to travel some more before the body shuts down completely. But I can't travel without writing. I love to see things come out of the darkness, and if I can't do that I'll feel I've lost something vital. I have to do that.” Things coming “out of the darkness”—unraveling the mystery of the unknown and rediscovering the meaning of the known in a new light—are central to Naipaul's traveling and writing. His explorations of the geographical territories of the earth are so intricately intertwined with his probing of the psyche of the people—real and fictional—whom he describes that one might rephrase his words and claim that he cannot write without traveling.

For this Trinidad-born grandchild of an East Indian indentured laborer, a trip to Oxford in 1950 opened the doors to a...