Cruel World: Violence in Naipaul's stories

Any reader of V.S. Naipaul's first story collection, Miguel Street (collected in the Everyman Library "Collected Stories") will be struck, I think, not just be the hard times and poverty of the Port of Spain neighborhood where Naipaul sets the stories and where, I assume, he grew up, but also by the hardened and bitter view of the world that the characters share and experience. All of the stories - at least through the first half of the book - are told from the point of view of the young (preteen and maybe early teen) narrator, but the narrator is just a vehicle or a window - he doesn't do much as a character, and only in a few rare moments does he look back on these scenes with the reflectios and perspective of maturity. The stories or scenes are truly sketches, as the narrator calls them at one point - outlines of a plot, details about a neighborhood character, held together by thin strands of connection - more so than the stories in Dubliners and maybe more like Winesburg, Ohio (thought the tone is completely different) - a character in one story appearing as a minor character or even a bystander in another. The stories get a little longer and more involved as the book progresses. The group (4 I think) that I read last night are typical of the collection: one about a woman who has a series (7) kids by 6 different partners, all of whom are cruel and indifferent; another about a feuding couple that moves into a house on Miguel Street and everyone knows that the husband mercilessly beats his wife - she is wealthier and more well-bred than he and no one is quite sure why she stays with him - she's obviously terrified - and nobody can do much to help her, except for the narrator's mother who at least listents to her concerns. Cruelty - especially toward women - is endemic and more or less expected in this neighborhood - and I don't know what that may say about Naipaul and his attitude toward women in his later, more mature fiction. Another story, with less violence but equal desolation, is about one of the characters who's a ragpicker but also, though it's never clear to the narrator, evidently a thief of some sort - always procuring valuable objects and materials that he claims the rich folks in a neighborhood across town just throw away. The 4th one that I read last night (not telling of these in order) was the only tender one of the lot - about a man who sets himself up as a tutor or school teacher (we'd met him in an earlier story, focused on his star student who, as it turns out, is unable to pass any of his qualifying exams). A very difficult world - and narrated with a cold, cruel eye - and also, I have to say, with a sharp wit: some of the dialogue is very funny.