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1972–1976: Trinidad killings, Argentina, Guerrillas

The short life and career of Michael de Freitas, a Trinidadian immigrant in the London underworld of the late 1960s, who returned to Trinidad in the early 1970s as a Black Power activist, Michael X, exemplified the themes Naipaul had developed in The Mimic Men and In a Free State.

In late December 1971 as news of the killings at Michael X's commune in Arima filtered out, Naipaul, accompanied by Pat, arrived in Trinidad to cover the story. This was a time of strains in their marriage. Naipaul, although dependent on Pat, was frequenting prostitutes for sexual gratification. Pat was alone. Intensifying their disaffection was Pat's childlessness, for which neither Pat nor Naipaul sought professional treatment, preferring instead to say that fatherhood would not allow time for Naipaul's sustained literary labours. Naipaul was increasingly ill-humoured and infantile, and Pat increasingly reduced to mothering him. Pat began to keep a diary, a practice she would continue for the next 25 years. According to biographer Patrick French,

"Pat's diary is an essential, unparalleled record of V. S. Naipaul's later life and work, and reveals more about the creation of his subsequent books, and her role in their creation, than any other source. It puts Patricia Naipaul on a par with other great, tragic, literary spouses such as Sonia Tolstoy, Jane Carlyle and Leonard Woolf. "

Naipaul visited the commune in Arima and Pat attended the trial. Naipaul's old friend Wyndham Lewis who was now editor of the Sunday Times offered to run the story in his newspaper. Around the same time, Naipaul received an invitation from Robert B. Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books to do some stories on Argentina. The Review, still in its first decade, was short of funds and Silvers had to borrow money to fund Naipaul's trip.

In 1973, Naipaul was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Artur Lundkvist of the Swedish Academy 's Nobel committee.