Naipaul seeks his centre

Press, 11 January 1986, Page 18

Naipaul seeks his centre

Finding the Centre. By V. S. Naipaul. Penguin, 1985. 157 pp. $9.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Diane Prout) In these two autobiographical pieces, V. S. Naipaul reveals much of the processes that have shaped him as an important contemporary writer. With characteristic directness and simplicity he takes the reader on a backwards journey into his origins in Trinidad and traces the racial and historical factors which led him from an unsettled childhood in Port of Spain to a scholarship at Oxford, and a job as a reporter with the 8.8. C. Caribbean Service. Without sentiment, he describes the lives of the Hindu labourers indentured to work the sugar cane plantations of the West Indies and the effects of disillusionment and cultural alienation on those closest to him.

The poverty and humiliation of his journalist father is simply recorded, as well as his extraordinary accomplishments in an inhospitable environment. The “Centre” of which Naipaul writes is the personal focus any novelist must find to give his work form and unity, a concept more elusive for Naipaul in view of his mixed social heritage. In “The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro” he describes the iirocess of collecting material for iction as the result of travel on the Ivory Coast of Africa. His experience of people, places, and political systems including those of Uganda account for much of his published work since 1960. “Finding the Centre” is a thoughtprovoking literary autobiography of a writer’s spiritual odyssey which should take the reader on to an exploration of the works of fiction it engendered.