Travel Blog

I discovered V.S. Naipaul in the British Council library in Warsaw, Poland. The book, A House for Mr. Biswas, would have dazzled me anywhere, but reading lush descriptions of Trinidad in Cold War Warsaw ensured it was a novel I would never forget. The author, through his evocative writing and colorful characters, seemed to be a kind of Dickens of the Caribbean.

Returning to the States, I discovered his travel writing, beginning with The Middle Passage. Naipaul was part of that great British tradition of novelists who also wrote travel books, but he brought to it a new perspective: that of the colonized instead of the colonizer. This didn’t make him any softer on his subjects, as his books on India demonstrate. But wherever he went – including the American South – he brought his piercing intelligence and moral imagination.

When I became a travel editor in South Florida, Trinidad was the one place in the Caribbean I wanted to visit. Port-of-Spain’s Carnival gave me a pretext, and I went to observe it in 1995. On Ash Wednesday, I made the pilgrimage to the Naipaul house in St. James, and then the Queen’s Royal College that he and his brother Shiva had attended.

“Slabs of late afternoon sunlight filtered through tall jalousied windows; three plain chandeliers swayed high above a sea of wooden desks. Printed atop a side wall was the long list – going back to the turn of the century – of scholarship winners. Next to the year '1948' appeared the name 'V.S. Naipaul.' It glowered like an admonishment to work and learn and escape your small, ragamuffin world.”