The Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited

It's a gripping essay/novel. It's full of humor, wisdom, and a very good narrative pace

If you want to read more from travel writings than Lonely Planet travel guides (which are excellent), start with American author Paul Theroux and then try his travel mentor, V.S. Naipaul. This book has Naipaul revisiting the home island of Trinidad. As an ethnic Indian, Naipaul can travel the Caribbean and Venezuela and get an honest perspective that perhaps a caucasian travel writer might not. That's a trite and somewhat insulting way to characterize his travel books, but I've bought five on that premise and been happy with every one. If you're not as well read on the classics as Naipaul is, open one of his books and try to keep up with his literary name dropping. Maybe I haven't read the European classics that he has, but it's enough to see a citation in one of his accounts of wanderings.This is one of his shorter books, pick it up for a travel-sized read on your own voyages.

A classic but not an easy read - especially if your new to author

Brilliant book. Learnt a great deal just reading his story. A simple style full of information of British Guiana and its politics. I felt as though I was there with him

excellent

What can you say! Naipaul's books paint an interesting picture of countries in the Caribbean as per their heritage of slavery and racial harmony. I enjoyed this book and his viewpoint! Can't help but wonder how it would read this many years later, has progress been made?

No writer writes with more pointed anger than the young Naipaul, and this book, along with An Area of Darkness, strikes the most strident note of rage. This is not surprising. The young Naipaul reserved his rage for the places, people and things which struck closest to his roots: for An Area of Darkness, India, and for the Middle Passage, even closer, the Caribbean. Although most of the places he writes of in this book have been radically transformed in the forty years since this was written, The Middle Passage is still worth reading. The writing, even when it levels off into casual meanness, is superb. This book amply illustrates Naipaul's complete mastery as a travel writer. Few writers get to the heart of place, its dark muddled center, than Naipaul, and he lays it out clear, crisp, and pointedly, and then moves on.

This wonderful quick read is V.S Naipaul's travels from Trinidad, to British Guinea through Suriname and then on to Martinique and Jamaica in the early 1960s. The dated feature makes the read fascinating. Here we see how racial issues have surfaced in Trinidad, where the Urban black population is at variance with the rural indian one. We see this through the eyes of an English educated Indian returning home to a nation he both loves and hates. He remarks att he outfite, the attire and aspirations of the people. In Guinea he meets Mr. Jagan, the Indian Communist leader who Naipaul will return to in his book "The Writer and his World". In Suriname we learn about a dutch colony where race has not been the deciding factor.Fascinating and poetic this story is a tour of the culture of the caribean. Of transplanted Africans and Indians living on islands and places once inhabited by natives, of the stirrings of colonial peoples and independence. A must read. Full of color, history, insights and amazing characters.Seth J. Frantzman