Word: englishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Unfortunately, The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul's new autobiographical novel, suffers from a surfeit of description and fantasy, leaving one bored instead of touched by its detailed portrait of the English countryside in decay...
...favor of "metropolitan material," that undefined something that "the writer" is supposed to write about. The older narrator deplores the romantic fantasies he wrote when he was younger. Yet that is just what the book goes back to after the brief respite of "The Journey": a sappy fantasy of English country life, elaborating on what he already has said in the first section...
...Naipaul's panoramic description of his neighbors and surroundings is overdone. He seems obsessed with the village's landscape, describing the land and people the way English romantics have done for centuries. He is once again writing what he is "supposed" to write instead of giving us some penetrating new insight...
...book jumps around in time so much that in order to refresh our memories before adding something new, Naipaul retells--often--what he already has told us hundreds of pages earlier. Besides irritating the reader, this practice drags down what could otherwise be a beautiful description of the English countryside...
...student government provides about half of the newspaper's financing with the remainder coming from the English Department, Auclair and Kaczynski said...