SOURCE: Siegel, Lee. “The Riddle of Identity: Preserving the Idea of Freedom Despite the Weight of History.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (21 October 2001): 4.

In the following review, Siegel judges Half a Life as the artistic interpretation of Naipaul's preoccupation, in his nonfiction, with the reality of poverty.

V. S. Naipaul hates poverty. He hates the miserable material and intellectual conditions he encountered in his travels to Islamic countries; he hates the sordidness of Third World regimes. He is less interested in the suffering imposed by colonialism, which he knows and acknowledges, than he is in the suffering that he observes in the urgent present.

For Naipaul's critics, however, it is rank snobbery merely to record the degradations of poverty or to register one's disgust at poverty. Rather, one must uncover the long history, often the long colonial history, that produced such conditions. Rewriting the standard, deceitful version of...