Prologue

Summary

The Prologue offers an autobiographical account of a scholar’s first encounter with Naipaul’s foundational novel, A House for Mr Biswas. It locates the reading of it in a colonial world defined by the arrival of indentured labourers to colonial sugar plantations. It is suggested that a writer needs a constituency, which is often a recognizable society or country that understands him. Likewise a researcher, a scholar, or a critic, too, needs a recognizable writer who, to vary Lionel Trilling’s recall of a phrase by W. H. Auden about “a real book” reading us, reads him or her. A book reads the critic, the scholar, and nowhere is this reciprocity of reading more marked than in someone from V. S. Naipaul’s own sugar plantation diaspora reading him. Important West Indian writers like Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, and Kenneth Ramchand, variously, make the claim that the children of indenture are Naipaul’s best readers. Naipaul himself had observed that his earlier “social comedies” can be “fully appreciated only by someone who knows the region” he writes about. The Prologue ends with the reception of Naipaul upon the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature.