Finding the Centre, The Enigma of Arrival, A Turn in the South and India: A Million Mutinies

Abstract

Naipaul’s writing began to change again in the early 1980s. This new mood first appeared in the ‘two narratives’ of Finding the Centre (1984). The tide is significant of the way the relation of the writer’s self to his work is now accepted as the answer to the problems of marginality, exile and insecurity that characterized his earlier books. The centre is now the creation and discovery of the self rather than external in an ideal society. Recognition that the problems of Trinidad, India and England are similar and that all life is subject to change was followed by a new mellowness. There are still moments of irritability, but such eruptions are brief and followed by what may seem a too tolerant interest. Women also begin to appear in the books as enjoyable friends rather than as dangers who mislead men from their work.

He had never before, I think, made a connected narrative out of those little stories. (India: A Million Mutinies, p. 202)