The Loss of El Dorado: A History

I think it's fair to say V.S. Naipaul is one of the finer writers of our time. Here his compressed, simple sentence structure, matched with fascinating details and copious research, works nearly as well for history as it does for his works of fiction. Turning his attention to his homeland, Trinidad, Naipaul reveals a lost history of Spanish, French and English colonialism, all fueled by the frantic, bloody search for El Dorado. Naipaul's three-part structure makes sense and is filled with remarkable anecdotes of greed, folly, slavery, barbarity, and one or two glimpses of decency and humanity. I had trouble putting this one down.

This is the historical counterpart to Naipaul's "A Way in the World", even though it was written more than two decades earlier - these books should ideally be read back-to-back. It provides a history of Trinidad from the original discovery by the Spaniards until the early nineteenth century. The canvas covered is vast - the early Spanish attempts at colonisation, Raleigh's poorly-organised and squalid search for an El Dorado on the Orinoco, the arrival of French refugees escaping from the slave-uprisings on Haiti and the establishment of British control, with a leading but hardly-creditable role being played by Sir Thomas Picton, later a hero of the Peninsula and Waterloo, and the use of the island as a springboard for fomenting revolution in Latin America. It is from beginning to end a ghastly story, dominated by greed, cowardice and cruelty. There is hardly a single character who emerges with credit and at times the reader is all but overwhelmed by the catalogue of mean-minded exploitation, atrocities and treachery. As always in his non-fiction writing, Naipaul uses a novelist's eye to bring colour and life to the narrative - adding not just to the immediacy but also to the horror of much of the material. This work goes beyond historical narrative however and presents simultaneously an extended meditation on the nature of power at its most basic level. It is a terrible and disturbing work - but a great one.

THis is a great book, a history of the founding of a place - where Naipaul was born - that virtually no one cares about. As such, there is nihilism at the very core of the book, which Naipaul emphasizes by beginning with a tribe (just a name) whose only existing reference was that it was annihilated during the colonization. And yet, this book is brilliantly written, full of drama of torture and interminable trials, great and bitter ironies that lead to what Trinidad became (or didn't), all of it adding up to a sense of the passage of human life and striving. I loved this book: it is a fascinating rumination by a highly talented writer, a dark essay on futility and non-history.It may seem obscure, but then, so is much of the Third WOrld's history. That is one of Naipaul's points. He is a true master.