Sanjay Subrahmanyam casts a rather wry eye at V.S. Naipaul's latest collection A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling.
There is only one kind of narrative fiction that Naipual understands to be properly modern; a sort of late Victorian, realist, slightly constipated fiction with a thoroughly old-fashioned narrative, an economic use of words, plenty of natural description (countryside, gardens, townscapes) and so on. The nonsense of post-Joyce, post-Svevo, post-Musil narriative, the 'literature of exhaustion' once celebrated by John Barth, can and should be flushed down the latrine (one of Naipaul's favourite words).
Naipual is, first and foremost, a child of the Indian diaspora, but not the one that exists today of Telugu software engineers and Punjabi fast-food millionaires. The diaspora to which he belongs and by which he is marked is the 19th-century diaspora that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the British abolition of slavery in the 1830s.
– Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Where Does He Come From?”, in The London Review of Books, Nov. 1, 2007, viewed online at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n21/subr01_.html