This past August saw the thirtieth anniversary of the tragically early death of the writer Shiva Naipaul, the younger brother of the better-known novelist V. S. (Vidia) Naipaul. Shiva, who was less prolific but arguably equally talented, died at the age of forty, likely robbing us of an important literary career. The writing he did produce, however—including two comic novels set in his homeland of Trinidad, an allegorical novel set in South America, and two controversial travel books—has held up well.

The overarching literary preoccupation of Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad to an Indian family and educated in England, was the Third World. He returned to the subject repeatedly in his pessimistic, even misanthropic, and sometimes bitterly funny work. Of particular note are his two classic works of travel literature, North of South: An African Journey (1978) and Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy (1980, published in Britain as Black and White).

Africa, Naipaul notes, is “a subject that, in the ex-imperialist West, is labelled ‘fragile,’ ‘handle with care,’ ‘this side up.’ ” In North of South, Naipaul travels to postcolonial East Africa to see for himself what grand ideological constructs like “socialism,” “liberation,” and “revolution” mean for the lived experience of average Africans. The book’s two parts offer two competing visions of postcolonial Africa, neither flattering.

In the first half, Naipaul lands in what was then Zaire, a nominally independent country whose economic and political ties to Belgium, its former