Naipaul's Reading and Writing: Novelisation of an autobiography

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An autobiography has more of fictional nature than one might believe. As we try to remember what happened twenty years ago our mind gets blurry and the feelings we have now of that moment may incorporate some aspects that may not be completely true. Naipaul in his Reading and Writing is a good example of it. Not only this but the novelisation of the story in order to make it attractive or more appealing to the reader situation is seen at this text. Naipaul uses his dad as a critical character for his story and describes in detail the situations that happens to him, which help us readers to overcome the reader-writer barrier that can be very hard because of the time in which it was written, the writers background and the historic context in which it was written, an aspect most people fail to remember when reading, and especially important when it is an autobiography you are reading.

            Naipaul is not the only one that uses this technique when writing an autobiographical text. We might want to add Esmeralda Santiago in, as she works a novelistic autobiography in When I was Puertorrican, Almost a Woman and The Turkish Lover. In these text we can see aspects very similar to what Naipaul uses, the characterization of, in this case, the mother and a very good description of places and situations for us to picture.

            It is crucial to remember that, even when we use novelistic techniques to make an autobiography more appealing and interesting, it has to stay an autobiography. When using these techniques there is a very fine line between a novel and an autobiography that if one is not careful enough, you might end up with a totally fictional text.