"Miguel Street" by V S Naipaul

A Cannery Row for Trinidad. Or is it Guys and Dolls?

The unnamed narrator is a fatherless young boy growing up and a street 'rab on Miguel Street, playing cricket and learning about life from the antics of the characters around him. He is quasi-adopted by father-figure Hat, whose comments on what is going on are kindly, perceptive and deeply philosophical. 

Each chapter examines one of the neighbours, including Popo the carpenter who is always making the "thing without a name" to Man-man the mystic, to B Wordsworth the poet, to Morgan who makes fireworks, to Mr Titus Hoyt the teacher, to Laura the mother on repeat, to Uncle Bhakcu who is always tinkering with cars which are never quite the same afterwards ... Each story is told with tenderness and compassion and some are very funny indeed. Speech is given in dialect and this builds a picture of a supportive and caring community in which everyone is poor but nobody is starving. We all have dreams and we all need to get on with our fellow men.

On the other hand, there is the domestic abuse. Men seem to beat women in almost all of the households on Miguel Street; sometimes the women beat the men back. The children are beaten for almost every conceivable petty wickedness. It may be a portrait of a community of its time but from this point of view these are anything but the good old days. But this is to criticise the novel for what it says and in this blog I have always insisted that a reviewer should foreground how it is said. Naipaul has an ear for dialogue and an eye for eccentricity and a heart for forgiveness and these are what makes this book exceptional.

Selected quotes:

• “Seeing God was quite common in Port of Spain, and, indeed in Trinidad at that time. Ganesh Pundit, the mystic masseur from Fuente Grove, had started it. He had seen God, too, and had published a little booklet called ‘What God Told Me’. Many rival mystics and not a few masseurs had announced the same thing.” (Man-man)
• “The authorities kept him for observation. Then for good.” (Man-man)
• “B. Wordsworth. ... Black Wordsworth. White Wordsworth was my brother. We share one heart.” (B Wordsworth)
• “He did everything as though he were doing it for the first time in his life. He did everything as though he were doing some church rite.” (B Wordsworth)
• “We ... saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else. Man-man was mad; George was stupid; Bigfoot was a bully; Hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “Hat used to say, ‘Is a damn nuisance, having that man trying to be funny all the time, when all of we well know that he not so happy at all’.” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “Mrs Bhakcu was four feet high, three feet wide, and three feet deep.” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “When he spoke it was in a pecking sort of way, as though he was not throwing out words, but picking up corn.” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “Hat said, ‘When I was a little boy, my mother used to say, “If a man wants something, and he want it really bad, he does get it, but when he get it he don't like it”.’” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “I suppose Laura holds a world record. Laura had eight children. There is nothing surprising in that. These eight children have seven fathers. Beat that!” (The Maternal Instinct)
• “For her first six children she tried six different men. Hat used to say, ‘ some people hard to please’.” (The Maternal Instinct)
• “Mrs Hereira said, ‘No, I know Tony. I looked after him when he was sick. It is the war, you know. He was a sailor and they torpedoed him twice.’ My mother said. ‘They shoulda tried again’.” (Love, Love, Love Alone)
• “It sound as though it coming from a gramophone record turning fast fast backwards.” (The Mechanical Genius)
• “What about all those woman and them who was chasing you? They catch up with you yet or they pass you?” (Until the Soldiers Came)
• “Many people stopped minding their business and looked up.” (Hat)
• “Hat’s dog was the only Alsatian I knew with a sense of humour.” (Hat)
• “It does happen to all man. They getting old and they get frighten and they want to remain young.” (Hat)
• “The only people who does complain about bribe is those who too damn poor to have anything to bribe with.” (How I left Miguel Street)
• “The Americans gave me a visa after making me swear that I wouldn't overthrow their government by armed force.” (How I left Miguel Street)
• “I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac.” (How I left Miguel Street; last words)

A lyrical portrayal of a community which seems to live up to the injunction of W B Yeats: "But I, being poor, have only my dreams ...

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

June 2025; 172 pages

First published in the UK by Andre Deutsch in 1959

My paperback edition issued by Penguin in 1971, the 1982 reprint

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God