READING AND WRITING - A PERSONAL ACCOUNT

In this essay of literary autobiography, V.S. Naipaul sifts through memories of his childhood in Trinidad, his university days in Oxford, and his struggles as a young, poor and inexperienced writer in London. He describes his responses to his family's native India, particularly his horror at the poverty and misery that he encountered on his first visit. He modestly reflects on the different possibilities that he found in the novel and the travel book for capturing the truth of his subjects and considers what makes a work piece of literature. He offers us a remarkably vivid account of the experiences and literature that shaped his imagination and allowed him to make his childhood fantasy of becoming a writer of fiction a reality.