Diaspora
Tales of the Diaspora
When VS Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in 2001, he said: “It is a great tribute to England, my home, and India, the land of my ancestors…” It is a heritage he shares with Jhumpa Lahiri, who was born in London and immigrated to America with her Indian-born parents. “While I am American by virtue of the fact that I was raised in this country, I am Indian thanks to the efforts of two individuals,” she said, referring to her parents, in an interview with Newsweek in 2006.
They have both drawn on their heritage as writers. While he is a Nobel laureate, she won America’s prestigious Pulitzer Prize with her very first book, Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories, in 2000. Interestingly, Naipaul’s first “publishable” work, by his own account, was also a short story, called Bogart, though it appeared only in his third book, Miguel Street, after the comic novellas, The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira.
Lahiri has never written anything comic, but comparisons with Naipaul are inevitable – and not just because of their heritage. Both are autobiographical writers.
“I am the sum of all my books,” Naipaul declared in his Nobel Lecture. He did not set out to write about his life. It happened by chance. He was 22 years old, an Oxford graduate working freelance for the BBC when one day while he was pecking away at the typewriter, the words suddenly came to him unbidden. He recalled the experience in his essay, Prologue to an Autobiography, in 1984:
“It is now nearly 30 years since, in a BBC room in London on an old BBC typewriter, and on smooth “non-rustle” BBC script paper, I wrote the first sentence of my first publishable book…
“It was … late one afternoon, without having any idea where I was going, and not perhaps intending to type to the end of the page, I wrote: Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, ‘What happening there, Bogart?’
“That was a Port of Spain memory…
When VS Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in 2001, he said: “It is a great tribute to England, my home, and India, the land of my ancestors…” It is a heritage he shares with Jhumpa Lahiri, who was born in London and immigrated to America with her Indian-born parents. “While I am American by virtue of the fact that I was raised in this country, I am Indian thanks to the efforts of two individuals,” she said, referring to her parents, in an interview with Newsweek in 2006.
They have both drawn on their heritage as writers. While he is a Nobel laureate, she won America’s prestigious Pulitzer Prize with her very first book, Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories, in 2000. Interestingly, Naipaul’s first “publishable” work, by his own account, was also a short story, called Bogart, though it appeared only in his third book, Miguel Street, after the comic novellas, The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira.
Lahiri has never written anything comic, but comparisons with Naipaul are inevitable – and not just because of their heritage. Both are autobiographical writers.
“I am the sum of all my books,” Naipaul declared in his Nobel Lecture. He did not set out to write about his life. It happened by chance. He was 22 years old, an Oxford graduate working freelance for the BBC when one day while he was pecking away at the typewriter, the words suddenly came to him unbidden. He recalled the experience in his essay, Prologue to an Autobiography, in 1984:
“It is now nearly 30 years since, in a BBC room in London on an old BBC typewriter, and on smooth “non-rustle” BBC script paper, I wrote the first sentence of my first publishable book…
“It was … late one afternoon, without having any idea where I was going, and not perhaps intending to type to the end of the page, I wrote: Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, ‘What happening there, Bogart?’
“That was a Port of Spain memory…