The people thought their problems were political, but I see it as the nature of the country, the way the society was founded. They cannot face things, such as the killing of the Indians for their land. They lie to themselves every day and try to invent a sort of cosmic mythology. . . . There is a certain 'scum' quality in Latin America. They imagine that if you kill the right people everything will work.
Genocide is their history.
His real work is in the poems, not in the tales. The poems celebrate the glorious land and the part played in it by his ancestors. But it is an awful history, not glorious. It is a bogus past. The fastidiousness of a Naipaul text, its pride and imaginative carefulness, are part of the man himself.