Part travelogue, part literary criticism, part political essay, and all Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization accuses its subject of smugness, passivity, incuriousness, false pride, snobbery, laziness, and an inability to adequately define itself as a nation (I'm sure I missed some), finds it guilty on all counts, and sentences it to dismemberment (Naipaul seems to predict the dissolution of the country before too long). The travel narrative consists of a few dinner parties, and guided visits to a Bombay slum and a rural irrigation project. It's barely adequate, but Naipaul's gift for observing and analyzing the people he meets is ever in evidence. The book talk focuses on R.K. Narayan (whom he convinced me I'm long overdue to read), the Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar, and the novel Samskara (both of which I think I can skip for now). The political essays, written (like the rest of the book) at the time of the Emergency, in the mid-70's, when Indira Ghandi suspended the constitution and effectively implemented a dictatorship, I found dull and hard to understand. There's a scathing takedown of the original Ghandi, based mostly on his autobiography (and what's not in it), and that and Naipaul's visit to an institute of rural technology where intellectuals try and reinvent the bullock cart and the plough were the only parts that made me laugh.

The thing about V.S. Naipaul is, he was such a jerk — pantomime villain territory, really — but his prose is always impeccable, and these two things mean I'll always be happy to pick up something by him for 50 cents from a library book sale, as I did this.