Sketchy stories: Miguel Street - V.S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul's first book of stories, published in about 1959, was Miguel Street, collected with his other stories in the Everyman edition of his "Collected Stories" - it's quite a surprise to read these some 50 years post publication - not sure anyone reading them in 1959 would have predicted that Naipaul would become a Nobel Laureate, but then again: a lot of writers begin with the material of their childhood, presented pretty much raw and unedited. Miguel Street is Naipaul's Dubliners, up to a point - but it's also notable that he refers to these stories, very accurately I think, as sketches: each one is a short sketch of one of the characters on the street or in the neighborhood where he grew up, in an Indian enclave in Trinidad (in the capital Port of Spain, I think). Dubliners is the view of the city as seen from the consciousness of a young boy, but Miguel Street is less about the narrator and more about the characters who surrounded him and influenced him - some of the sketches are pretty funny, some are very poignant, particularly B. Wordsworth, about a a vagrant who more or less latches on to the narrator - obviously a young Naipaul - and teaches him about literature and about sorrow and loss. Many of the other stories or sketches are full of violence and bullying - a very tough neighborhood character who scares all the young boys, a brutish husband who beats his wife and kids. Another one of the very strong ones tells of the frustrated aspirations of a boy studying for Cambridge - his tutor tells the whole neighborhood that he is a genius and will pass with honors, but he fails repeatedly and gradually lowers his expectations for life and settles into a menial job. You realize how little chance these kids had of making anything out of their lives, and how their estimates of someone who is a genius fall far short of the mark - it's truly a series of stories about class and colonialism, though all set among one class, in one colony. Part of the mystery of the stories is how Naipaul himself was able to rise above these unpromising origins - in a sense, every one of the stories is a boast: See how far I've come in the world. He was never known for his modesty or timidity. There's a certain coldness about the stories, too - he's not looking back with love and sentiment, but as if through a glass at a peculiar specimen. Of course he was also using these sketches - just as an artist uses sketches - trying his hand with some of the material he would pull together and shape in his great early novel A House for Mr. Biswas.