V.S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018), born in Trinidad of Indian parents before moving to Britain, defeated the attempts of critics to attach him to a particular belief, society, place, or race. Freed by immigration, he can aspire to a certain universality, using the human condition as his subject-matter; on the other hand, like so many of his central characters, he is free only in the sense of drifting, and the mainly comic mood of his earlier novels is overlaid in his later work by the sadness and realization of rootlessness. In this 1976 study, Michael Thorpe traces Naipaul's development and growth in stature as a novelist who is now recognized as being in a class by himself among Caribbean writers.