Lieve Joris

Politics

Home, to the snakes and the sensitive plants

• 17 December 2001

A few miles from the legendary Lion House, built for Mr Biswas, Lieve Joristalked to V S Naipaul and his family in Trinidad in the early 1990s. Her essay, published here in English for the first time, casts fresh light on the the novelist and his often shocking attitudes to his native land and its people