A Way in the World.

• Author: Martin, Jorge Hernandez

The English edition of V. S. Naipaul's latest work calls itself "a sequence"; his American publisher is offering it more formally as "a novel." The discrepancy arises from the fact that the author links autobiography to history and political reporting to fiction, in this exploration of roots and displacement, past, and memory.

In A Way in the World, Naipaul anchors his narrative in his native Trinidad and Tobago. From this geographical setting, he develops his wide-ranging meditation on the Caribbean. In an introductory invocation of the landscape of his native island, he writes:

I can tell you . . . the Amerindian name for that land. . . . I can look at the vegetation and tell what was there when Columbus came and what was imported later. I can reconstruct the plantations that were laid out. . . . I can give you that historical bird's eye view. But I cannot really explain the mystery of . . . inheritance. . . . In our blood and bone and brain we carry the memory of thousands of beings. . . . We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

For Naipaul, "we" refers to a divided Caribbean identity created by a wave of colonization that brought thousands of people from all corners of the world and washed them up on a spot on the map called Trinidad, or Jamaica, or Guyana. The mystery tie then recreates and explores concerns the dilemma of transplanted people thrown together with others with whom they must forge a life and uphold the myth of being a community in the world.

Naipaul's exploration proceeds through nine interconnected stories. The vision that unfolds contains both the "fabulous past" of the Caribbean and the "smaller scale" of Naipaul's personal experience. Thus, the episode of a grizzled Sir Walter Raleigh awaiting news of El Dorado in his vessel by the mouth of the Orinoco is followed by the author's trip through the same area, now viewed as the scene of a native past whose irretrievable loss means the disappearance of a particular conception of time and space. Later, in the same Gulf of Desolation, and almost two hundred years after Raleigh, Francisco de Miranda appears. Dreams of power would haunt him in La Guaira prison before his deportation to Spain. For Naipaul, Raleigh and de Miranda are historical figures emblematic of "the madness and self-deception" that the Caribbean and its riches have unleashed in the human imagination through the centuries. In seeking fulfillment...