V.S. Naipaul turns 77 today. I discovered him in Poland in 1982, when I checked A House for Mr. Biswas out of the British Institute library. For several weeks, the drab streets of Warsaw filled with the colors and sounds of Port-of-Spain.
I was taken by the cast of characters - Naipaul seemed a kind of Dickens of the tropics - and the rich language he used to describe them. (I began making a list of new words to add to the much lengthier one in Polish.)
When I returned to the States, I read more of his fiction - discovering him to be more of a modern-day Conrad - and his numerous travel books. An aspiring travel writer, I was encouraged that he was continuing the mostly British tradition - exemplified by Trollope, Lawrence, Huxley, Greene, Waugh, Orwell, Durrell - of great novelists who not only also wrote travel but took the genre seriously. Later, when I became a travel editor, I visited in Charleston one of the people he wrote about in A Turn in the South, and then, years later, met another at a book festival in Nashville.
I have never met Naipaul, and after reading Theroux's memoir of their friendship, I don't really care to. But I will always admire his writing, and be grateful for his elevation of the literature of travel.
