Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul has been either praised to the skies or held up to public obloquy ; he is considered as the greatest writer in the English language, or as a writer whose ideological and political attitudes are sometimes considered dubious—few writers have been as controversial as V. S. Naipaul. The tensions that surround the man and his oeuvre are only echoed by the multiple strands that his writing has been taking over the past fi fty years—multifarious and yet paradoxically more and more centred. V. S. Naipaul not only writes fi ction and non-fi ction, he covers a wide spectrum of the literary practice, writing short stories and novels, essays and travel writing. A few academics among the specialists of V. S. Naipaul’s work present us with papers on different aspects and periods of the writer’s oeuvre, from 1957 to 2002, as well as the richness and complexity of the writing. They make it easier to understand how generic boundaries are not what matters. The sense of form and creation is simply at work in every text. It is the same furrow that is being ploughed with different tools. The papers were originally presented at the conference “V. S. Naipaul : a World in Tension” (Paul Valéry University, Novembre 2002).