Naipaul is a writer of genius, but ["The Return of Eva Peron"], it seems to me, has had very little to do with his odd literary celebrity of the past few years. The writer who built, word by word, the dense and extraordinary Trinidad of Mr. Biswas (in the novel "A House for Mr. Biswas," 1961) was considered a genre taste. The writer who stripped that Trinidad down to the image of a bogus messiah of Black Revolution (in the novel "Guerrillas," 1975) had become our scourge for truth, a Solzhenitsyn of the third world. The persona "V. S. Naipaul" turned out to be a projection, complicated by our own guilt and condescension and cowardice.

By now, we embrace Naipaul as a kind of prophet without God, one of those doomsday misogynists who used to wander through Russian novels, raving and shaking their staffs at the gentry in their country houses—someone whose vision of moral fault has marked him with a crazed and arrogant and somehow blessed purity…. It is as if his foreignness, his status as "one of them," gives him a license to see, as if our hypocrisies translate into his ethnic privilege.

Naipaul's exile is not really a matter of displacement or dispossession. It has to do with a bitter, almost fanatic clarity, with great pain on the edge of fatal pride. There is not much point in reading the Naipaul of the past 10 years if we seize on an ex-colonial's weakness for the "idea" of English civilization and reduce the moral landscape of his books to a map of our own attitudes and narrow politics….

Naipaul's journalism is always a cartoon for the finished canvas of his fiction, a drafting of outlines and impressions that will eventually reappear, transformed but faithful in detail, in a novel or story. He wastes nothing. (p. 1)

Naipaul is a masterly reporter, a witness, and not simply because he brings a novelist's eye and phrasing or a moralist's vision to journalistic material, but because, in curious ways, he is freed from his own demons by reporting. He seems more comfortable (if the word applies) in work that by definition consigns him to the periphery of events and lives, that mandates his looking on, his looking in, that gives a neutral context to what has come to be an almost implosive mix of passivity and outrage in his perceptions….

Writing those last furious novels, Naipaul has been profoundly alone with his characters. They seem to strip the protective cover of his authorship. The clarity of the encounter seems to leave him helplessly exposed. The pruderies and taboos that bedevil the heroes of his early novels turn, here, into a kind of avid sexual contempt—a disgust really—that bedevils him. In the end he suffers more than anyone, and this is the odd power of novels such as "A Bend in the River" and "Guerrillas." But the pieces in this book—the legwork that precedes the novels—are more like the famous essays on India ("An Area of Darkness," 1965, and "India: A Wounded Civilization," 1977) or the earlier autobiographical writings about the Caribbean ("The Middle Passage," 1963). They have the same kind of bitter confidence. It is as if Naipaul, in his reporter's stance, has found a calming, tempering piece of the periphery, a legitimacy to distance, a perspective that finally connects him to his subject without extraordinary cost to himself.

These pieces, then, ground his assumptions about the "dumb nihilism" of third worlds that are really shadow worlds, worlds that could disappear into the bush or ocean or savannah without a trace of an explanatory idea of themselves to leave behind….

Naipaul is hard on Trinidad. People who know Trinidad well say that it was never quite the wasteland of consumer poverty Naipaul describes in "The Killings in Trinidad." But Trinidad is his island, black by government, half-Indian by population, and it floats like a private symbol between his people's history in India and the English schoolbooks that were once his only link to that history. (p. 30)

[It] is the missing idea that haunts Naipaul, the palpable absence that gives everything he describes a kind of negative illumination and leaves nothing real except a savage frustration, finding its release in blood and torture and sexual humiliation, in the castrating fury of the impotent. Argentina's rulers and vigilantes are like Salim in "A Bend in the River," spitting between the legs of the woman who has shamed him. Their woman is an idea that eludes them….

So we have another book of Naipaul's "journalism," written with obsession and eloquence. A topography of the void. (p. 32)