French Literature Reviews - 2026

V. S. Naipaul, Le Regard et l'écrit
Francophone and Oral Literatures

V. S. Naipaul, Le Regard et l'écrit

Translated from English by François Rosso and Bernard Turle.

Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 2013.

272 p.

EAN 9782246789482

22,00 EUR

Publisher's overview:

“I have no accessible past, no past that I can penetrate and contemplate; and I suffer from this lack.” So speaks, as is his habit, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Booker Prize winner in 1971, Nobel Prize laureate in literature thirty years later, brilliant, misanthropic and occasionally worldly, a detractor of the easy comforts of post-colonialism, transformed into a reactionary Cassandra in his Wiltshire cottage. “The world is what it is; those who are nothing or do not seek to become someone have no place in it,” he wrote in A Bend in the River.
In this essay, previously unpublished in French—which is in fact a collage of several essays, ranging from England to India, from birth to adulthood, from innocence to disillusionment, from poverty to fortune—Sir Vidia casts his terribly lucid gaze and once again plays the teacher of writing and life. His school? It is the street outside his grandmother’s house, the pavement, the poor, the uprooted Indians, a minority within a minority, the outcast among outcasts: “They were the ones who offered me my first book.” He writes from lived experience, right to the quick. On Derek Walcott, the other Caribbean poet; on Anthony Powell’s aristocratic England (“the failure is resounding,” he says, ungratefully, considering the great novelist had praised his first novel!); on Flaubert—the irritating and superb Sir Vidia writes definitive sentences here. Alternating between shadowy modesty and wounded pride, far from his “transplanted peasant India,” he strikes out and grows impatient. The end of this polemical book questions Gandhi's India, “this little emaciated man,” and subsequently: “India is harsh and materialistic.” At seventeen, in his correspondence with that father so present and yet absent, he said little else. Sir Vidia was already hitting the mark, as this essay confirms in a lofty and elegant style.

Born in 1932 in Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, but descended from Indian immigrants, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is one of the greatest writers in the English language, honoured first with the Booker Prize in 1971 and then the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lives in England, retired in his Wiltshire cottage.

This volume gathers a series of texts that range across geographies and personal milestones, moving from England to India and tracing a trajectory from early poverty to literary success. As a collage of previously unpublished writings in French, the book reflects the author's characteristic blend of lucidity, polemic and introspection. The texts engage with various figures and cultural landscapes, touching upon Derek Walcott, Anthony Powell, Flaubert and the complex legacy of Gandhi's India. Throughout these pages, the Nobel laureate returns to formative experiences of uprootedness and the early influences that shaped his literary vocation.

Readers interested in modern autobiographical essays and the intersections of post-colonial identity may find this translation a pertinent addition to the author's reception in the French-speaking world. The collection highlights the persistent themes of displacement and the writer's critical perspective on societies in transition. Those who follow the trajectory of twentieth-century literature in English will recognize the familiar tone of an observer marked by a diasporic heritage and a demanding approach to the craft of writing.