The Heart of the Pathetic
V.S. Naipaul's Among the Believers and A Turn in the South
Nate Barksdale
January 1, 2002
Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, by V.S. Naipaul (Random House, 1982), 430 pp.
A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1990), 307 pp.
One of the advantages of getting your reading material from public libraries is finding handwritten notes and comments from your fellow readers in the pages of a borrowed book. Usually these are limited to inscrutable underlining and earnest corrections of minor facts. Occasionally, though, the comments are more entertaining: angry little essays scrawled in the margins. These protestations are, I would submit, one of the more gratifying forms of vandalism: a reminder to the solitary reader that he is but one of a league of citizens through whose hands, over the course of decades, this particular book will pass.
Two Aprils ago, when I checked out a copy of Among the Believers, V.S. Naipaul's account of his 1979 travels through four non-Arab nations in the process of remaking themselves as Islamic republics, I discovered one of the best of these sets of marginalia. Over several pages, neatly inked letters explained the readers' fervent if somewhat vague grievances. Come on, Naipaul, one of the little essays said, you haven't been listening at all-a serious accusation for a book composed largely of transcribed conversations-from the start you'd already arrived at your own arrogant conclusions-another serious accusation for a book whose purpose, according to its author, was to find answers for questions that were not being addressed in the news media's coverage of Islamic revolution, upheaval, and revival.
What's noteworthy, though, about this little critique is not so much its content, but rather where in the course of the book it came. That a library patron in a liberal university ...
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