By Jyoti Thottam
Asked whether he would receive a percentage of the gate for his reading last week at Queens College, the writer V.S. Naipaul said with just the hint of a smile, “I wouldn't be a very rich man.”
The wry comment was the one moment of humor leavening an otherwise sober evening. Naipaul read a passage from his 1998 book “Beyond Belief” to about 65 people in Queens College's Lefrak Hall, who braved the night's snowstorm for an hour with the author, and left abruptly after a short question-and-answer session, declining to sign books as scheduled and living up to his reputation as a man with little regard for social niceties.
Naipaul, 68, the author of nearly two dozen works of fiction and non-fiction and a past winner of the Booker Prize, visited Queens as part of the publicity tour for a collection of letters, “Between Father and Son,” which was published in January. The book records the correspondence between Naipaul while he was a young man studying at Oxford University and his father, Seepersad Naipaul, a struggling journalist in Trinidad.
He announced at the beginning of the talk, organized as part of the college's “Evening Readings” series, that he would not be reading from the letters.
“They're far too personal and too raw, the emotions,” he said.
Instead, he read from “Beyond Belief,” a 1998 book recounting an extended trip through several non-Arab Muslim countries: Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan. But the passage he chose, from a section of the book called “The Bomoh's Son,” described the evolving relationship between another father and son who could have been surrogates for Naipaul and his father.
The bomoh, or traditional healer, raises his family within the rituals of his profession and grooms his eighth son, Rashid, to take his place. But Rashid rejects that life and converts to Islam, seeking both the comfort of belief and inclusion in the Muslim majority of Malaysia.
“He liked the constant references to God as the most beneficent and the merciful,” Naipaul read. “To be a Malay was to be a Muslim.”
Rashid decides to become a police officer, attracted by the power of the position and its status within Malaysian society. But as an adult reflecting on his life, Rashid comes to realize the emptiness of his authority compared with the enduring respect his father commanded.
“Rashid, seeing his father so close to death, thought of his hard childhood and of all that he had managed to do,” Naipaul read. “All his children, so many of them born at an unpromising time, were now well placed.”
At his reading of the same passage the night before to a standing-room only audience of 900 in Manhattan, Naipaul choked up with emotion and began to cry, but last Tuesday night, he read straight through without a pause. The turnout in Queens was poor, perhaps due to the snowstorm, and the crowd of 65 seemed particularly small in a space that seats 433.
The audience, which included Queens College students and a few of Naipaul's fellow Indo-Caribbean immigrants, sat silently through the talk, with the exception of one woman who sat near the front and snored through the entire reading.
Naipaul was born in Trinidad, where his ancestors had emigrated from India as laborers. Having earned a knighthood and critical praise that places him among the greatest living writers in the English language, Naipaul holds a particularly honored place in the Indo-Caribbean emigre communities in the United States and in Great Britain.
Naipaul, as is his custom, agreed to answer a handful of written questions from audience members, who had been asked to write them down on index cards.
The first question began by quoting Naipaul himself in an earlier interview, “One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.”
Asked whether he would ever write another comic novel, he said, “Yes, but not out of hysteria. Out of great calm.”
Joe Cuomo, director of the Evening Reading series and a lecturer in English from Queens College, asked Naipaul two questions about feelings expressed in his earlier works that seemed to have been resolved in later ones: the fear of extinction and a sense that one was not in control of one's life.
But Naipaul cut him off, dismissing the question as “too romantic.”
“I'm much more in control of my world now,” Naipaul said. “It's a young man's feeling.”
After five minutes of questions, the talk was over and Naipaul left the stage. A few people lingered afterward in the hallway, wondering why Naipaul seemed so peevish, unwilling to sign books or chat with those few dozen who had braved the cold and snow to listen for an hour to his Oxford-polished voice.
Naipaul, meanwhile, put on his black felt fedora, surrounded himself with his wife, assistants and publicists and brushed right past them into a waiting car.
