Becoming Naipaul By Roger Harris Sept 7, 003: V.S. Naipaul's essays play an important part in understanding this remarkable writer and are often a reliable guide to his fiction. Sometimes, the essays play on the same themes as his fiction -- giving another version of similar events, written in a different style and manner. Indeed, two of his best novels, "A Bend in the River" and "Guerrillas," are fictional reworkings of his nonfiction books. The 10 essays in this volume, though, are somewhat different in content from those in other collections of Naipaul's nonfiction. As the title suggests, they are about writers and writing. Yet, when other writers discuss literature they tend to critique or praise the works of other writers. These essays, by contrast, are about Naipaul's unusual and circuitous path to literary greatness and the personal and literary influences that made him the writer he is. Naipaul lives in England, but his ties there were forged relatively late in life. He was born in Trinidad, but his roots go back to India. He is a descendant of Indians who came to Trinidad as indentured servants and worked their way to freedom. In several of these essays, he describes how he became an English writer -- one who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. As Naipaul tells it, he had to go back to his roots to learn how to write. As a young Trinidadian, he was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University. After university, he went to London to launch his writing career. The problem was, he couldn't write. He was trying to be an English novelist, drawing on his English experience, but this was not the stuff of usable fiction. Finally, he returned to his life in Trinidad and wrote a book about it. The result was his first novel, "The Mystic Masseur," perhaps not his finest work but still very much worth reading today. That helped him find his voice, and put him on a literary path that worked for him. According to Naipaul's essays, the greatest influence in his life was his father, a journalist who, when his journalistic efforts dried up, sometimes wrote short stories about Trinidadian life. Two other major influences were Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling. Naipaul was fascinated with Conrad, even though he didn't always like his work, because Conrad, who was born and lived his early life in Poland, was another English writer who was not a true Brit. Sometimes he finds Conrad exasperating, yet he is a great admirer of Conrad's novel of South America, "Nostromo." As for Kipling, he finds him important in his own life because Kipling wrote so often of India, one of Naipaul's homelands. At times he is exasperated by Kipling's narrow viewpoint, but he also finds much to admire in Kipling's scenes of Indian life. One of the essays that best explains the man and his writing is Naipaul's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Two Worlds," which describes how contrasting cultural backgrounds gave him his great theme. His literary path is guided by one thing, intuition, Naipaul tells us. He also tells us something that is obvious from his writing, that he writes from no fixed political idea. Another fine essay, "Prologue to an Autobiography," describes the incidents in Trinidadian life that led to some of his fiction. For those who have never read Naipaul's novels, there is simply no substitute for them. But those already familiar with his work will find their understanding greatly enhanced by these essays.