Between Father and Son: Family Letters Book

Perhaps the title is a misnomer. This book instead documents letters connecting the Naipaul family across oceans and continents -Vidia in Oxford, Pa and the family in Port of Spain and Kamla in Benares.

The letters themselves are quite frank and reveal much of Naipaul's personality and his relationship towards his parents and siblings.

Young Vidia or "Vido" appears the typical colonial Oxford student - reading piles of dead authors' work, attempting to lure the ladies, writing short stories, hosting tea and "bottle parties" in his dingy flat and traipsing across the continent to deal with his depression.

Similarly, Kamla faces her own struggles in India and often seems homesick, desperate and confused. Both siblings often write of their loneliness, their worries regarding the family back home and their lack of money.

Even when Kamla or Vidia fail to write home on numerous occassions, these letters act as go-betweens between father and children, helping to heal the family bonds, already stretched and frayed across space and time.

At times, both Kamla and Vidia appear foolish and selfish, failing to recognise the sacrifices the other family members make to finance their lifestyles and rash decisions overseas. Pa seems the perfect martyr. He is more than willing to support his son's ambitions to become a great writer since he failed to become a famous author himself. He often confesses to Vidia that because he is trapped by family obligations, he can never achieve what his son can. He even confesses his jealousy of commercially successful Samuel Selvon while he, the self-professed "better writer," suffers at the Trinidad Guardian newspaper.

In spite of his pettiness, he often exorts his son to plod on, even when Vidia's depression hits hard. Vidia, too, often encourages his father to keep writing and reassures him that he will get his collection of short stories,The Adventures of Gurudeva, published. This only happens after his father's death.

In these letters, Vidia's foibles, especially his proclivity for cheap cigarettes, come to the forefront. He often appears a coward, a person who thinks he is "holier than thou," pontificating from a position of physical and psychic distance. He is never in Trinidad to deal with the jealous and petty relatives. He is absent when his father dies from a second heart attack. He is not there to be a father figure to young Shiva.

These letters also reveal that once Vido is bitten by the foreign bug, he resolves to never return to Trinidad and its "intellectual starvation." Instead, he succumbs to the "grass is always greener" syndrome, atypical of many Trinis living abroad. For example, he reviles "educated Trinidadians" who say "pre-fer-able" instead of "pref-erable" and who think "everything begins and ends with Trinidad." He also preaches, "Education isn't a matter of getting a degree- where Capo R. fails; it is a lot more...it should create a mind that thinks" (I totally agree with him here).

These glimpses into the Naipaul family dynamic, especially its rivalry with the dreadful Capildeos,make the reader understand why Naipaul wrote A House for Mr Biswas in such a poignant manner. It's a novel close to his heart, more than loosely based on his father's trajectory from humble beginnings in Chandernagore to the oppressive Lion House and to the family home on Nepaul Street.

Although sometimes petty and often high-handed, Between Father and Son:Family Letters, is indelibly honest and helps to shed light on Naipaul's early years as a struggling writer and to reveal why he is one of the most enigmatic and misunderstood authors today.