The plethora of commentary from highly respected voices in a broad cross-section of academic disciplines, which V. S. Naipaul’s death on 11 August 2018 elicited, ranged so widely, both cognitively and emotionally, that if a student of literature, unfamiliar with the Naipaulian era, read it all, they would have failed to make sense of the divergences.Allegations included that he ‘was a cruel man’, ‘a scarred man’, ‘the darkest dungeons of colonialism incarnate: self-punishing, self-loathing, world-loathing, full of nastiness and fury’, ‘a ventriloquist for the nastiest cliches European colonialism had devised to rule the world with arrogance and confidence’ and so on. On the other hand, writers referred to Naipaul as a ‘brilliant writer’s writer’, one ‘who holds a mirror of imagination unto society to capture a certain view of reality’ and one who ‘has turned the genre of the travelogue into an art form’.Debates aside, many of us appreciate the value of Naipaul’s writing to the deepest possible comprehension of the imperial impulse and the myriad reasons it manifested as colonialism. The First Naipaul World Epics is the first in a series of critical collections that aim to demonstrate this value. At the same time, the series seeks to help the new student through the quagmire of divergent opinions his personality and writing have generated.
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