Word: manors
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...household. The last governess died mysteriously, and Miles' teacher did too. To complicate matters, she begins to hallucinate, seeing the images of the dead governess and teacher hovering around the children. She starts and screams for no reason, and all this within three days of arriving at the manor...
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...
...some 40 years of struggle, his ideal landscape, Naipaul must watch its deterioration and decline. He can, within reason, be philosophical about this process, acknowledging that his sense of loss is not unique: "Yet I also knew that what had caused me delight, when I first came to the manor, would have caused grief to someone who had been there before me." What he loves represents a dereliction of what existed earlier...