V.S. NAIPAUL : Wanderer Of Endless Curiosity

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Few writers have made better use of their estrangement than Naipaul. He recently returned to India to gather material for his third book on the subcontinent, and things could be going more smoothly. A recent election in the southern state of Tamil Nadu has been disruptive. Madras' main streets are filled with festive tides of celebrators waving the red-and-black banners of the victorious Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Party. Naipaul is trying to sort out the issues, which include the historic antagonism of South Indians toward traditional Brahman power. Eventually, he will decipher the complexities of culture and politics on paper, but for the moment, he says pointedly, "it is the old story: the darker-skinned people against the lighter-skinned people."

The sorting out takes time and patience. An interview with a local bureaucrat seems to support Naipaul's contention that "everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two." After much difficulty, he has arranged a chat with two Tamil radicals. The pair are escorted to the writer's hotel room by two plainclothesmen. The luxurious Taj Coromandel is overrun by an international gathering of leather-goods manufacturers, and for all anyone can tell, Naipaul and his group could have just concluded an agreement to turn sacred cows into discount luggage. His reaction to the interview indicates that he would have found such a deal more interesting. "They were criminals with nothing to say," he remarks impatiently. "No patterned narrative, just fanatical belief."

Rumors that V.S. Naipaul has mellowed are somewhat exaggerated. His testiness seems for the moment to be tempered by weariness. "The mind fills up with so many images," he says, and one is suddenly aware how many of our images of the Third World come from his tightly woven books. He once wrote, "I have no attitudes; no views. I have appetites and reactions, violent reactions." Naipaul claims he is now content to be a quiet listener. Readers looking for a verbal lynching by the leading chronicler of modern folly and delusion may have been disappointed by his recently published A Turn in the South. But what they got was far more than the standard tour of the new liberal Dixie. In texture and tone, the work is a departure for Naipaul. "I was not interested in what I thought; I was interested in what the people thought," he says. Working up to 14 hours a day, Naipaul roamed the old Confederacy talking to black intellectuals, redneck philosophers, white-collar workers and auto-factory hands now employed by the Japanese. The result is a book of scenes and voices and, of course, a layering of past and present. The South's agricultural and religious roots, its history of slavery, and the evolution of its race relations and economy are played off against the comments of people trying to understand the small parts of what Naipaul eventually conveys as a whole: a region of America that is like an emerging nation within a nation.