I am still so happy that I read The world is what it is. The authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick Frenches biography of V.S. Naipaul. If not exactly autobiographical, Naipaul's work is deeply based in his own experience, and the biography creates the perfect background to his works.

Between father and son. Family letters is an (auto-)biographical work bringing together the letters of V.S. Naipaul and those of his father, and sister over the period 1949 -1957, during which he settled in England and developed into being an author. What is great about this book is that it prints his letters together with those of his correspondents, so you can read the letters and answers in fully transparent context. The letters are often of medium length and informative. Naipaul's father was a journalistic writer, who was hesitant about writing fiction. Their interaction and mutual support strengthened both writers, and the father was able to help his son significantly with introductions to media that would pay for contributions

Obviously, very well-written and very readable. ( )

Your letters are charming in their spontaneity. If you could write me letters about things and people — especially people — at Oxford, I could compile them in a book: LETTERS BETWEEN A FATHER AND A SON, or MY OXFORD LETTERS. What think you?
— Seepersad to Vidia, 22/10/1950

As so often happens, Seepersad's confidence in his son's abilities as a correspondent turned out to be misplaced, and the eighteen-year-old clearly had more interesting things to do in Oxford than write lively descriptive letters to his family back in Trinidad. The letters he did write turn out to be mostly about family matters, money, writing, and schemes for smuggling cheap cigarettes into Britain. Oxford life is mentioned only in passing, if at all. And in between, there are long gaps, filled with the usual complaints and enquiries as to what is going on.

Sir Vidia understandably seems to have been rather lukewarm about this project, which shows him mostly as a grumpy, selfish adolescent, but he didn't block it, and he left all the editorial work to his longstanding agent Gillon Aitken — even if it is his own, rather more marketable name that appears on the cover.

Aitken has done a remarkably good job with the materials at hand, though, cleverly seeing that it reads best as a triangular correspondence between Vidia in Oxford, his elder sister Kamla in India (where she was studying at Benares Hindu University) and the parents and remaining siblings in Port of Spain. The third major writer in the family, Shiva, was still at primary school in the early fifties. By stringing various people's letters together, it turns into an interesting story of a family strung halfway round the globe by the effects of colonialism.

Of course, the other great interest in the book is the odd coincidence that father and son were both at the same stage in their development as writers of fiction, and both riding on the wave of the early fifties Caribbean writing boom, with Henry Swanzy looking for poems and stories for the BBC's successful Caribbean Voices programme, and their fellow-Trinidadian Sam Selvon bringing out his first novels to great acclaim. Seepersad, who was clearly jealous of Selvon, his sometime colleague on the Trinidad Guardian, was an experienced journalist just breaking into short story writing and trying to put together a novel, whilst Vidia was working on the university paper Isis as well as selling one or two stories a term to Swanzy. Whilst doing his best to swallow the uninspiring Oxford English diet of the day, which was still dominated by dense clumps of Anglo-Saxon, Spenser and Milton. And of course one of them tragically died young and the other went on to win the Nobel Prize...

If you want to know about V S Naipaul's early years, you're better off reading the novels and The enigma of arrival. But this is still interesting, in unexpected ways. ( )

De briefwisseling tussen Naipaul en zijn vader is niet de meest inspirerende. Vertederend, dat wel – zowel vader als zoon zijn (op dat moment nog ongepubliceerde) schrijvers. De brieven staan boordevol aanmoedigingen om toch vooral het schrijven niet op te geven, en jubelberichten over een verhaal dat voor de radio zal worden voorgelezen. De vader schrijft van thuis uit, d.i. Trinidad. De zoon zit op dat moment in Oxford. (Op weg naar Oxford, tijdens een tussenstop in New York, verorbert hij in zijn hotelkamer het lunchpakketje dat zijn moeder hem meegaf: een gebraden kip.) Wat de vader de zoon verwijt is ook wat de lezer hem kan verwijten: hij beschrijft bijzonder weinig – de nieuwe omgeving, de mensen, de gewoonten. De brieven worden in de eerste plaats gevuld met excuses voor het zo lang niet geschreven hebben (ook al dateert de vorige brief niet zelden van amper een week geleden), met verzoeken om geld, met verzoeken om toch vooral geen geld te sturen, met familiale nieuwtjes, … Een ‘literair portret van Trinidad in de jaren vijftig en van het leven in Oxford’ biedt dit boek niet.

De titel van de briefwisseling is wat ongelukkig gekozen, al zinspeelt ze op een van de plannetjes van vader Naipaul om een boek als dit ooit te laten verschijnen. Maar heel wat van de brieven zijn ook gericht aan, of afkomstig van Naipauls oudste zus die, terwijl Naipaul aan Oxford studeert, zelf in India studeert en soortgelijke beslommeringen heeft.

Eerst onwennig – en zonder tafelmanieren – sluit Naipaul na enkele jaren een definitieve terugkeer naar Trinidad uit. De kloof is te groot geworden. De briefwisseling eindigt met het bericht dat zijn eerste roman werd geaccepteerd, The Mystic Masseur, en dat hij ook het volgende, Miguel Street, al zo goed als klaar heeft. Zijn vader is dan al enkele jaren dood, maar de toekomst van de familie is verzekerd. ( )