Naipaul is a writer of genius, but ["The Return of Eva Peron"], it seems to me, has had very little to do with his odd literary celebrity of the past few years. The writer who built, word by word, the dense and extraordinary Trinidad of Mr. Biswas (in the novel "A House for Mr. Biswas," 1961) was considered a genre taste. The writer who stripped that Trinidad down to the image of a bogus messiah of Black Revolution (in the novel "Guerrillas," 1975) had become our scourge for truth, a Solzhenitsyn of the third world. The persona "V. S. Naipaul" turned out to be a projection, complicated by our own guilt and condescension and cowardice.

By now, we embrace Naipaul as a kind of prophet without God, one of those doomsday misogynists who used to wander through Russian novels, raving and shaking their staffs at the gentry in their country...