The Middle Passage
by V.S. Naipaul
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Book Summary Information
Author: V.S. NaipaulEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-01-08
ISBN: 0375708340
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Middle Passage
Book Review: Decent but distant
Summary: 3 Stars
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2001, wrote this summary of his observations travelling through the Caribbean area where he was born just after his famous novel, "A House for Mr. Biswas". This book was his first published nonfiction, and although the typical themes of Naipaul (migration, racial issues, legacy of colonialism) play the main roles in his observations, this work is generally not as interesting and succesful as his fictional depictions of the same issues.
In "The Middle Passage", Naipaul describes how he travels from the UK, where he had been living for ten years, back to his homeland of Trinidad, and onward to Guyana (then British), Suriname (then Dutch), Martinique, and Jamaica. The main part of the book depicts his experiences in Trinidad itself. Naipaul is generally critical but not unsympathetic to the different racial-ethnic groups found in the Caribbean and their struggles to overcome the legacy of colonialism, and clearly does his best to be fair and objective to all involved. Nonetheless, it is noticable his instinctive sympathies are mostly with the Indians in the Caribbean like himself, and his depictions particularly of black Caribbeans have been criticized, among others by Edward Said for perpetuating racist mythology. These charges may be somewhat exaggerated, as Naipaul definitely does not deny them their agency or their attempts at political improvement; but one can note that he tends to portray the colonial and postcolonial situation as more rosy than it really was, and there is some sense of fear of "barbarian self-rule in civilization", of the kind one found in South Africa that Coetzee so effectively described.
What's more, the impressions and events within the travel stories themselves lose their sharpness due to the lack of real structure - nothing really happens to Naipaul at any point, he just travels around and sees various places, repeatedly making the same observations about the Caribbean without this having much direct connection with the situation he is in. His moving around from one part of the region to another does add some flavor, and there are occasional passages that are gripping and interesting, such as the tense situation regarding black Caribbean migrants to the UK as they board the ship Naipaul is on, and also his travels to a village deep in the Amazon forest, where everyone is Seventh Day Adventist and dying of disease. But on the whole, both the travel descriptions and Naipaul's reflections fail to be sufficiently sharp and meaningful the way a travel book needs. It is still a well-written and readable book, but by no means great literature.
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