A WRITER'S PEOPLE: WAYS OF LOOKING AND FEELING
By V. S. Naipaul
Alfred A. Knopf, 189 pages, $24.95

If the Nobel Prize is the ticket to one’s own funeral, as T. S. Eliot once quipped, then V. S. Naipaul is taking the scenic route. His authorized (but unsupervised) biography has just appeared in the United Kingdom, where the press mined it for every mention of his nastiness toward his first wife and mistress. But before that drama replays itself here, Mr. Naipaul has published A Writer’s People, a series of essays and reminisces in which he ruminates on the reputations of fellow writers. Derek Walcott, Anthony Powell and even Flaubert come under the knife, and serve as entry points for a kind of negative introspection: Mr. Naipaul defines himself by what he’s not.  read more »