Literary Platypus V.S.

By R.Z. Sheppard

In V.S. Naipaul's new book, A Way in the World, chapters based on the author's life precede chapters about Sir Walter Raleigh and Francisco de Miranda, the failed 19th century Venezuelan revolutionary. When published first in England, the work was subtitled A Sequence. The U.S. edition (Knopf; 380 pages; $23) has been redesignated A Novel. Why not? Border disputes between fiction and nonfiction grow drearier, while writers keep declaring their independence with new ways of telling their stories. Besides, calling Naipaul's 23rd book a novel is easier than calling it what it is: a patterning of autobiographical and historical narratives.

Naipaul is an artful arranger. His technique is to layer memory and history so that the past is an iridescence that colors the present. Layering also evokes our identities or, as Naipaul puts it, "In our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings."

This notion sounds fanciful, especially in the West where the autonomous individual is sacred and the willed reinvention of personality is a ritual. Naipaul is himself a successful product of modernity's powers of transformation. He was born 61 years ago into a Hindu society that had been transplanted to rural Trinidad by indentured laborers from India. Molded by family custom and the tensions of his multiracial island, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was then reshaped by British institutions. They included a scholarship system that brought the gifted young colonial to postwar England, where he settled and began his long, penny-pinching slog toward literary distinction.

Novelized in the first chapters of A Way in the World, parts of this success story appeared more explicitly 10 years ago in Finding the Center. Naipaul called that piece of writing "Prologue to an Autobiography." The new work is an analogue to that and other earlier books. As in A Way in the World, the nameless narrator of The Enigma of Arrival might as well be called V.S. Naipaul. Raleigh and Miranda were prominent in The Loss of El Dorado; they reappear here in chapters that Naipaul says grew out of ideas for dramas.

In music, a return to familiar themes is called recapitulation. In literature going over old ground looks as if a writer has temporarily run out of material. Naipaul has attracted greatest attention with journalism and novels fed by travels to places that most people would avoid: regions of Africa, India, the Middle East and Latin America deformed by poverty, injustice and fanaticism. An outsider by birth and occupation, a tragedian by temperament, he reported caustically on a world where history and human nature mocked political idealism and personal ambitions.

In contrast, A Way in the World is introspective. By grafting scenes from his life to the severed dreams of old acquaintances and failed New World adventurers, Naipaul makes some odd reconnections to his past. The result is a literary platypus, a species that should not exist but does -- not beautiful but undeniably part of a major writer's distinctive evolution.