The Loss of El Dorado: A Colonial History

By V.S. Naipaul

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400030765
• ISBN13: 9781400030767
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

A Bloody, Tragic, Fascinating Slice of Colonial History

I think it's fair to say V.S. Naipaul is one of the finer writers of our time. Here his compressed, simple sentence structure, matched with fascinating details and copious research, works nearly as well for history as it does for his works of fiction. Turning his attention to his homeland, Trinidad, Naipaul reveals a lost history of Spanish, French and English colonialism, all fueled by the frantic, bloody search for El Dorado. Naipaul's three-part structure makes sense and is filled with remarkable anecdotes of greed, folly, slavery, barbarity, and one or two glimpses of decency and humanity. I had trouble putting this one down.

Powerful, disturbing and unforgettable

This is the historical counterpart to Naipaul's "A Way in the World", even though it was written more than two decades earlier - these books should ideally be read back-to-back. It provides a history of Trinidad from the original discovery by the Spaniards until the early nineteenth century. The canvas covered is vast - the early Spanish attempts at colonisation, Raleigh's poorly-organised and squalid search for an El Dorado on the Orinoco, the arrival of French refugees escaping from the slave-uprisings on Haiti and the establishment of British control, with a leading but hardly-creditable role being played by Sir Thomas Picton, later a hero of the Peninsula and Waterloo, and the use of the island as a springboard for fomenting revolution in Latin America. It is from beginning to end a ghastly story, dominated by greed, cowardice and cruelty. There is hardly a single character who emerges with credit and at times the reader is all but overwhelmed by the catalogue of mean-minded exploitation, atrocities and treachery. As always in his non-fiction writing, Naipaul uses a novelist's eye to bring colour and life to the narrative - adding not just to the immediacy but also to the horror of much of the material. This work goes beyond historical narrative however and presents simultaneously an extended meditation on the nature of power at its most basic level. It is a terrible and disturbing work - but a great one.

Naipaul's history of "nowhere"

THis is a great book, a history of the founding of a place - where Naipaul was born - that virtually no one cares about. As such, there is nihilism at the very core of the book, which Naipaul emphasizes by beginning with a tribe (just a name) whose only existing reference was that it was annihilated during the colonization. And yet, this book is brilliantly written, full of drama of torture and interminable trials, great and bitter ironies that lead to what Trinidad became (or didn't), all of it adding up to a sense of the passage of human life and striving. I loved this book: it is a fascinating rumination by a highly talented writer, a dark essay on futility and non-history.It may seem obscure, but then, so is much of the Third WOrld's history. That is one of Naipaul's points. He is a true master.