Word: naipaulã
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...impossible to read “North of South,” Shiva Naipaul??s cynical yet deeply moving account of a late 1970s journey through East Africa, without being reminded of the travel writings of his legendary elder brother, V.S. Naipaul. Only 40 when he died of a heart attack in 1985, the unfortunate younger Naipaul cannot escape comparisons to his sibling, older by 13 years and a literary behemoth and Nobel Laureate often described as Britain’s greatest living writer. Shiva Naipaul??s work is more than worthy of notice...
...that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” Speculation immediately brewed over whether the citation meant to acclaim the writer’s anti-Muslim travelogues, or his novels and stories, which have dealt with colonial subjects in times of indigence, pathos and humor. Naipaul??s most recent travel book, Beyond Belief, detailed how nations that had converted to the Muslim faith—and suppressed their own traditions—had ravaged their own cultures. His best (and funniest) novel, A House for Mister Biswas, tells how an Indian-Trinidadian ascends from...
...Naipaul??s latest novel, the thin, peculiar and effective Half a Life, goes some distance toward showing that the two spheres represented by his travelogues and his fiction are, for Naipaul, hardly separate. Half a Life’s protagonist, Willie Somerset Chandran, undergoes a series of life changes and geographic moves that illuminate how the colonial condition makes its subjects bury their own pasts, both personal and collective, as they adjust themselves to their native, colonial and adoptive homelands...
These themes have been treated elsewhere—most flamboyantly, by Salman Rushdie in East, West and The Satanic Verses. In Naipaul??s younger days, he had a sense of humor as sharp as Rushdie’s, but always muted by wry restraint. By now this restraint has entirely choked away the humor in Naipaul??s fiction, as well as much of the dark gravity that made Naipaul??s post-comic fiction so attractive. The final section, with its political uncertainty and sense of alienation, faintly resembles a low-key A Bend...
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