Word: manor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Naipaul's 19th book yields its pleasures slowly. Its plot is essentially the passage of ten years, during which the writer lives in a cottage on the grounds of a Victorian-Edwardian manor in a Wiltshire valley within easy walking distance of Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain. In the beginning he arrives; at the end he goes. In between, this writer (hereafter called, for the sake of convenience, Naipaul) thinks occasionally about the first 18 years of his life in Trinidad, "my insecure past," and the scholarship that took him to Oxford and England, "the other man's country." He reveals...
Much of the drama in the book stems from the tensions generated when a ) sensitive grown-up finds himself living in a fantasy of his youth. Naipaul passionately annotates the splendors he observes surrounding the manor cottage: "The beauty of the place, the great love I had grown to feel for it, greater than for any other place I had known." Mixed with this euphoria, though, are some troubling recognitions. The writer cannot forget that he is an "alien" in this paradise, racially distinct, a former colonial subject of the power and wealth that made such a place possible: "Fifty...
...workers hired for this enterprise murders his wife for her infidelity. A London radio personality and book reviewer, distantly related to Naipaul's reclusive landlord, commits suicide. The gardener, whose comings and goings helped the writer regulate his solitary days, is abruptly fired. The man who manages the manor dies suddenly of a stroke. Elms in the valley die out; beech trees near Naipaul's cottage must be cut down; two huge aspens are torn apart by heavy wind...
...Patrick Kelly showed a rambunctious line that had the dash and Technicolor splendor of a Minnelli musical. Rifat Ozbek, whose clothes have an easy, funky swank and a kind of surreptitious sophistication, neatly encapsulated London's trend toward revisionist sartorial conservatism, where rock style has been replaced by bemused manor- house dressing. Milan's Romeo Gigli, working with finesse and the wily eye of a fine stylist, accomplished the inevitable: he took the vaunting ideas of Japan's great fashion designers, tailored them down and gave them fresh commercial pertinence. The upstart fashion of all three designers brought a leavening...
Government Professor James G. Manor from the University of Leicester in England is another India specialist visiting partly for the comparative Fairbank seminar. While Manor and Washbrook were appointed through their respective departments, their visits are being financed by grants through the Fairbank Center, MacFarquhar says...