When Shiva Naipaul had a fatal heart attack at his desk in August 1985, at the infuriatingly young age of forty, he was at work on a book about Australia. Quite literally at work on it—the beginning of a first draft was in his typewriter when he died. Like his brother the Nobel laureate, Shiva Naipaul was a travel writer as well as a novelist and in both capacities interested in the colonial condition in all its permutations, from neo- to post-. His first non-fiction book, North of South (1978), had been a travelogue of Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia that peeled back…