When asked in an interview in 1994 what made him want to write (Face to Face with Jeremy Isaacs, BBC2, 16 May), V. S. Naipaul had replied: ‘An idea of nobility, a love of the smell of books, a love of the feel of books, a love of lettering, a wish to be famous – all these things’. The interview was given with a sense of ambitions having been fulfilled: Naipaul had twenty-four books to his name then, had been knighted recently (1990), had a bagful of literary awards (including the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Booker Prize, the Bennet Award, the T. S. Eliot Award, the Jerusalem Prize and the Trinity Cross from Trinidad), and had seen the opening of the Naipaul Archives at the University of Tulsa in 1994. It is interesting that at that moment of retrospection after having ‘arrived’ (his 1987 novel was entitled The Enigma of Arrival), the above-quoted sentiments express a youthful veneration for books, not simply as a medium for expression and creativity, but as tangible, sensual things. Naipaul's perspective of literature, and his contribution to it, is permeated with this sense of the tangibility of books. It is the basis of a peculiar sort of self-consciousness in his writing which is distinct from, and yet implicitly related to, the more overt levels of self-consciousness that are manifest therein.

Critical studies of Naipaul have frequently explored the other levels of self-consciousness that are manifest. All his books present an apprehension of his place in the world and an assessment of the world he inhabits (and Naipaul finds himself in a markedly cosmopolitan world) through excavations in time and place. His earlier books take him back in time: receding from his memories through the labyrinthine paths of family history to the hazy vista of Caribbean history itself. Starting from himself and his childhood Trinidad of the thirties and forties, he gradually draws his roots through the instabilities of an Indian Trinidadian family history of migrations and cultural adjustments, to the blurred colonial history of the Caribbean with its cryptic records, uncertain cultural definitions and redefinitions, shifting and disappearing populations.