A review by gef
Miguel Street by V.S. Naipaul

3.0

Naipaul's "first written, though third published novel." A series of character sketches from a Port-of-Spain (Trinidad) slum, related by an East Indian Trinidadian child becoming adolescent, sketch by sketch. They read like practice pieces, exercises in portraiture and dialogue, in the peculiar syntax that I suppose is (was?) characteristic of the Port-of-Spain proletariat. Book is of interest mainly for understanding Naipaul's development of his craft. Time is impressionistic, child's time. The early sketches take place in the "once upon a time," or disappeared eternity, of the experience of one who is very new to the world and to whom all adults seem immutable. The story I found most memorable is "B. Wordsworth," the poet who never existed and who was never a poet and who may or may not have survived a girl poet pregnant with their little poet, but who still left the boy narrator with the sense that he carried poetry in him. (1982.10.28)