The Nobelist and the Pygmies

By ELIZA GRISWOLD

Whether he sets his tales in Africa, England, his native Trinidad or anywhere else, V. S. Naipaul is always writing about V. S. Naipaul. In this respect, “The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief,” his 30th book and 16th volume of nonfiction, is not different. This latest journey to the continent is part of a larger whole, the developing narrative of a single consciousness.

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello

V. S. Naipaul

THE MASQUE OF AFRICA

Glimpses of African Belief

By V. S. Naipaul

241 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95

Related

• Up Front: Eliza Griswold (November 7, 2010)

• Times Topic: V. S. Naipaul

But “The Masque of Africa” marks a startling evolution of that consciousness. In Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Gabon and, finally, South Africa, a newly curious Naipaul is leading an adventure among the faithful. Still writing with the same spare, acerbic lyricism that earned him the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, Naipaul is willing to express a new attitude, one of self-doubt. This acknowledgment of human frailty — starting with his own — broadens his observational powers immeasurably. As he sets out to explore what he calls “the beginning of things,” he proves willing to turn his brutally accurate lens back on himself.

This is a book about mysteries. Naipaul neither attempts to solve many of them, nor does he explain them away via the penetrating and self-assured assumptions his readers have come to recognize. “Among the Believers” (1981) and “Beyond Belief” (1998) made short work of Islam. Now, in the Islamic town of Kano, Nigeria, he watches Muslim children, “innumerable, thin-limbed, in dusty little gowns, the unfailing product of multiple marriages and many concubines.” Christianity is not spared his severe gaze either. In a decadent Ivory Coast cathedral, he spies a copy of Bernini’s baldachin from St. Peter’s, and sees in it a symbol of the abusive waste that has ruined the country: outside, “hidden from the cathedral and its gardens,” are mounds of uncollected garbage, “Africa reclaiming its own.”

He still looks askance at what he views as the alien religions of Christianity and Islam in Africa. Yet Naipaul treats African indigenous spirituality quite differently. The tone of this, his most recent foray into the search for life’s meaning, is respectful and sometimes even hesitant.

“We picked up a guide there, or perhaps we were picked up by him,” he writes at the start of his unsettling journey through the religious marketplace of Uganda, the country that first took him to East Africa in 1966. Naipaul is still Naipaul, to be sure, still a skeptic and an occasional crank prone to outrage. He is still so tightfisted he refuses to pay even for the bottles of schnapps his visits to African witch doctors and healers require. (His favorite guides are those who cover lunch.)

In Kampala, the Ugandan capital, he is overwhelmed by the bustling religious chaos: “There was a mosque or church at the top of every hill,” he writes. “Religion here was like a business that met a desperate consumer need at all levels. There were competing mosques of various sorts.” Yet these kinds of certainties fall away fast. There’s much that Naipaul has missed in the past, and he’s not afraid to tell us so.

On that first trip to Africa, Naipaul was a writer in residence at Makerere University in Kampala. Deeply involved in the writing of his novel “The Mimic Men,” he hid in his bungalow to work. Now remorseful, he recalls that he was “busy with my book, following the local situation with only half a mind, thinking that I had all the time in the world for local events and local sightseeing.” Soon after Naipaul left Uganda for Kenya, Prime Minister Milton Obote suspended the constitution and installed himself as president. Great violence descended on the country.

Such unfortunate history, Naipaul believes, is a kind of “illness” that infects everyone who lives it. “You made your peace, so to speak, with your illness; and the time began to pass,” he writes. “You began to live in this half-and-half way. It became all you knew; it became life.”

Naipaul knows how to let a story build itself quietly through accretion, through accumulated observations of those he meets. His is neither a romantic’s nor an anthropologist’s tale. It is a collection of voices that make sense only in relation to one another. When this mode of storytelling works, we move from one voice to the next without really noticing that the speaker has changed. There’s not a lot of unnecessary scene-setting: what’s important is what’s being said.

Eliza Griswold is the author of “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.”