Word: authored
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...author, who now lives in rural Montana and is a consulting geologist, says little about his writing career. He reveals that he is a poetic observer of the earth's surface as well as its depths, ever alert to the sounds of silence -- a cricket, a katydid, a car passing in the distance, the hum of a freezer. Crisp winter walks during his college days at Utah State made him feel like "the president of snow...
Bass can laugh at himself. His linking of oil with eons-old oceans may be the stuff of poetry, but how about oil and Coke? The author, preoccupied with the earth's dwindling oil reserves, was aghast to learn four years ago that his personal fuel was also in peril. When the Coca-Cola Co. announced a new formula for Coke, he began buying up crates of the old stuff. "The world is so thirsty for oil, uses so, so much. We are down to the last thousand Cokes," he mourned. Of course, Coke got a reprieve. That seems unlikely...
...Waugh said that punctuality is the virtue of the bored. In Naipaul's case, arrivals and departures constitute the story of his life, and tardiness disrupts the narrative. "If one is not on time, things won't go right," he warns, though one learns quickly not to take the author's fretful comments personally...
...nonfiction such as An Area of Darkness and The Loss of El Dorado and in his novels Guerrillas and A Bend in the River changed Western perceptions of the underdeveloped world. Free of their colonial keepers, new nations had to confront their own hearts of darkness. In Africa the author found tribalism overgrowing hopes of progress; in India he observed that poverty was more dehumanizing than any modern machine. Eight years before Salman Rushdie outraged the Imam, Naipaul had pinpointed the problem of true believers: "In the fundamentalist scheme the world constantly decays and has constantly to be re-created...
Despite his complaints, Naipaul's curiosity remains unflagging. "I'm so dazzled by the richness of the world that I think fiction is not quite catching it," says the author whose own novels are exceptions. Naipaul is a constant reader, although he admits to rarely finishing a book. He dislikes the prose of Gibbon and the King James Bible because he finds it too smooth. He prefers the rich accents of the Elizabethans. "My writing is full of helpless echoes of Shakespeare," he confesses. He listens to the tapes of the sonnets at dinner and reads the dramas at night...