As enlightened people we are supposed to believe that all cultures are equidistant from eternity, that none is perfect, that each should be judged by standards that are immanent in the culture itself since no one, now, believes in universal standards. They are values, and values are culture-bound. Applied to an alien culture, they become forms of vanity. But this kind of moral inflation is hardly a danger for us. The danger for us is of a sort of inverse imperialism: the suppressing of our values out of cultural guilt and in the name of cultural relativity….

There is, I think, an element of self-deceit in this attitude. Painfully conscious of the despised roots of his own values in Christianity, capitalism, and industry, the liberal mutes his anger at the inequality, the despotism, and the climate of cruelty in many of the poor countries. He has a doctrine that they are the victims of Western imperialism, of Western finance, and he is afraid of blaming the victim. It is an understandable reaction, and if I have spoken of it too glibly, it was to mask how much I share it. And because I share it, V. S. Naipaul is for me an indispensable writer….

His great subject is the imperialism of Western moral styles and jargon in the poor countries. This mimicry of the West is both morally distasteful and historically inevitable to Naipaul. He writes about petty men with petty illusions, living in petty countries; and he writes about them fiercely: he seems a man who has fought too hard for lucidity to let sentimentality or guilt cloud his vision. In his fiction this absolute lucidity is offset by his sympathy for his characters, by his awareness of the avalanche of history that is bearing down on them (or that already has come crashing down elsewhere). But in his journalism, Naipaul's concern is with societies, and with these more abstract entities his caustic intelligence has full play.

Naipaul judges the societies he has written about—India, the West Indies, Spanish America, Zaire—not by the values of the West but on a tacit analogy to the human personality, a less parochial perspective….

Balancing this personalist, almost existentialist, perspective is an idea of history: of how the sheer age of its civilization can weigh a country down; and of how, conversely, the absence of history can lead to a sense of national improvisation. To Naipaul, a people's politics reflects its history, its society, and its land…. [In the essays contained in The Return of Eva Peron] he discusses a small land, Trinidad, and two immense and empty lands, Zaire and Argentina.

The Argentina piece, a grouping of several essays written between three and five years ago, may have been outstripped by events in this or that particular. But this affects neither its quality nor its pertinence, since Naipaul's subject is always national character, that which determines events….

Naipaul's Argentina is a land of fear and fantasy, a country where politics consists of identifying one's enemies. (p. 36)

Naipaul's concern is with the secret of Peron's grip on Argentina. His inquiry is complex. It involves accounts of the 100 years of Argentine history stretching behind Peron, a story of plunder; of the country's rapidly improvised social fabric, "its half-made character"; and of the Argentine "macho," the embodiment of this ruthless land, who violates women with the same crude ferocity that his ancestors displayed against the Indians. Again and again Naipaul's search for the secret of Peron and Peronism comes back to that unlikely star of our stage, Eva Peron; the title of the essay, "The Return of Eva Peron," thus is enacted in its structure…. Eva Peron is the patron saint of Peronism. She gave the movement its inspiration and she named its cause…. Eva identified the enemy, "so that even when the money ran out, Peronism could offer hate as hope." But neither she nor the movement could go beyond hate; there was no idea of reform. "Peronism was never a program. It was an insurrection." We think of ideology or nationalism as the driving forces of world politics, but Naipaul's somber essay draws our attention to something more elemental—hatred, that pain about other people, a little discussed but massively determining force in the international as well as domestic politics of the poor countries.

Hatred is also a theme in "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad"—hatred of race, not of class. (p. 37)

The essay's first sentence sets the right, ominous, tone, "A corner file is a three-sided file triangular in section, and it is used in Trinidad for sharpening cutlasses." It is a tone similar to that in Naipaul's 1975 novel Guerrillas—full of irony and menace—and Malik is clearly the model for Jimmy Ahmed, the malignly empty publicity guerrilla of the novel. There is no cant about the nonfiction novel in Naipaul, but without taking extravagant imaginative liberties, he establishes the character of Malik with the same care he used to create Jimmy. (p. 38)

The essays on Zaire and a personal essay on Conrad are variously interesting. But for its masterfully sustained irony as well as for its final chord of pathos, this Trinidad essay is the most powerful in the collection.

What is missing from Naipaul's journalism is a sense of the mixedness of life. To judge by Naipaul, nobody laughs or smiles or tells the truth in Argentina; and nobody challenges, much less laughs at, his gloomy views, either. Obsessions are clearly at work here, eliminating discrepant data from consideration. Naipaul may be free of liberal guilt, but clearly he has hang-ups of his own. Where do his obsessions end, and where does Argentina begin?… [One] begins to wonder whether the intensity of his prose and the singlemindedness of his vision do not come at the expense of representativeness. It is hard to separate the power of his work from the truth of it. The spell he casts may be stronger than the light he throws. Still, it is an unforgettable spell, and who can doubt that it reveals a face of truth? (p. 39)