A Way in the World

A Way in the World is an unclassifiable work published in 1994 by V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature: the British edition carries the subtitle "a sequence," while the American edition is labeled simply "a novel." The book consists of nine parts that are at once independent and mutually echoing, stitching together autobiography, travelogue, historical investigation, and fictional narrative, with a timeline stretching from Elizabethan voyages and colonization all the way to the twentieth-century wave of decolonization; in space it shuttles between Trinidad, Venezuela, Guyana, London, Uganda, and an unnamed African colony. The book contains Naipaul's own shadow: a small boy in Trinidad, a young clerk who secures his future through a scholarship, an unknown writer struggling to begin in London, a writer traveling in East Africa on a foundation grant; and it also contains names recorded by history—the navigator Walter Raleigh, the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco Miranda—as well as small figures who barely leave a trace in the archives: a frustrated clerk, an immigrant who changes identities, a revolutionary without a revolution of his own. Their best years are past; they ought to have achieved fame and success, yet they find themselves at a dead end; caught in the cracks, they seek selfhood and fulfillment, each walking his own way in the world, heading toward a destined disillusionment, yet in a sense also changing the world. The book draws on the same materials as Naipaul's earlier historical work The Loss of El Dorado, but adds more fictionalized autobiographical elements, and may be seen as a rewriting of his own origins and of colonial history.