Customer Reviews

An Unfinished Journey

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Fresh from reading French's gripping and unsparing biography of his brother, Vidiadhar Surujprashad, I recently returned to Shiva's writing intrigued in part by the promise implicit in the essay "My Brother and I" to more fully explore the nature of the relationship (both personal and as writers) between the two brothers. In the event, I was disappointed. The essay adds little to what was gleaned about the relationship from the elder Naipaul's biography, perhaps because there was little to say - the relationship being neither substantial nor sustained. Shiva is known to have chafed at the inevitable comparison with his more famous brother, but that was what had led me somewhat skeptically to read his "Love and Death in a Hot Country" (Guyana) many years ago. As a Guyanese and therefore somewhat more conversant with the situation on the ground, I had been disappointed at the superficial and even somewhat exploitative quality of the book. But, perhaps because of his continued maturity as an observer and chronicler, "An Unfinished Journey" is insightful and spontaneous, where Hot Country had had a more pedestrian and contrived feel to it. In "An Unfinished Journey", his vignette on his conversation with his Sri Lankan traveling companion is both perceptive and memorable and his arrival in Sri Lanka with neither agenda nor contacts is somehow endearing and in sharp contrast with his brother's modus operandi. The question he raises in his essay on Sri Lanka, "How to exist, how to become properly real - that is the question", he did not live long enough to attempt an answer to. Neil Bissoondath, nephew of the two brothers and a noted writer in his own right now living in Canada, was featured in a TV 5 Monde programme a few weeks ago. He spoke with great feeling and in perfect French about his adopted Quebec City. Whatever the quality of Neil's writing (I have not read any of his books), the elder Seepersad Naipaul could sleep peacefully in his grave content that his dream of literary success has been vicariously realized, and then some.