Andrew Holter at the Paris Review:
V.S. Naipaul once told the critic Adam Shatz that there are two kinds of writers: writers and missionaries. The latter subordinate themselves to some vision of social uplift—to politics, in a word. The Naipauls understood themselves to serve a higher purpose, free from the alleged distortions of sentiment. Much of the elder’s reporting from Africa and the Middle East, especially, was scornful, ill-informed, and racist by any measure. Yet at its finest, V.S. Naipaul’s journalism brought something new and needed to the rather anodyne genre of travel writing. “I hadn’t realised that you could write about your ancestral country and people with such raw honesty,” Pankaj Mishra told the Guardian about his teenage discovery of Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness (1964), “or that you could so fearlessly expose your own rages and neuroses.”
Journey to Nowhere belongs to the resurgence of Anglophone travel writing in the seventies and eighties that his brother helped inspire—with an investigative, even prosecutorial bent. The last thing the victims at Jonestown needed was another missionary, Naipaul decided.
more.
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