**In this masterpiece about Trinidad, the Nobel Prize-winning author has
"given us a lesson in history [and] shown us how it is best written"
(The New York Times).
**
The history of Trinidad begins with a delusion: the belief that
somewhere nearby on the South American mainland lay El Dorado, the
mythical kingdom of gold. In this extraordinary and often gripping book,
V. S. Naipaul--himself a native of Trinidad--shows how that delusion
drew a small island into the vortex of world events, making it the
object of Spanish and English colonial designs and a mecca for
treasure-seekers, slave-traders, and revolutionaries.
Amid massacres and poisonings, plunder and multinational intrigue, two
themes emerge: the grinding down of the Aborigines during the long
rivalries of the El Dorado quest and, two hundred years later, the
man-made horror of slavery. An accumulation of casual, awful detail
takes us as close as we can get to day-to-day life in the slave colony,
where, in spite of various titles of nobility, only an opportunistic,
near-lawless community exists, always fearful of slave suicide or
poison, of African sorcery and revolt. Naipaul tells this labyrinthine
story with assurance, withering irony, and lively sympathy. The result
is historical writing at its highest level.
