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BOOKS I READ: The Overcrowded Barracoon by V.S. Naipaul (1973). A collection of essays, mostly from the 1960s, on the struggles of former colonies forging identities that will serve them well as independent nations; on India and its writers; and reporting during his stint as a journalist. Put together, the essays were like opening a time capsule of a time that seems so far away, yet so relevant to issues of today.
As a West Indian East Indian, he takes on the (huge) problems of India, the power-hungry and mostly ineffectual leaders of island nations, and in the title piece, the suffocating lives of Mauritians, my namesake island, Ile Maurice, in French. The island is the barracoon of the book title, impoverished and doomed. Finding work is the dream of the young, who, for years, wait patiently for a break that will get them a position in a foreign land, usually as a nurse. Mauritius, at the time of the article (1972), produced nurses for export. That was about it.
He doesn’t hold back his disdain for relics and Indian myths that keep the country of his grandfather in a state of suspension, suspension from true progress. These essays, along with those on Indian writers such as Nirad Chaudhuri (Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Passage to England) and C.L.R James (Beyond a Boundary), are entertaining, insightful, and unsparing. The essay on Norman Mailer’s ill-fated run for New York City mayor on a platform to make NYC the fifty-first state in the late 1960s was nostalgic visit to a city that no longer exists.
Previous book from the reading log (or check out a list of all my recent reads):
