Word: naipaul
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Over the years, however, Naipaul seems to have changed. His earlier works, set mostly in Trinidad, were happier, suffused with an appreciation of the sometimes joyous results of his own cultural mixture. But one could hardly describe Naipaul's recent work as joyous, "The Crocodiles of Yamoussourko," for example, offers a compelling but hopeless view of one of Black Africa's most successful nations. Naipaul echoes in non-fiction a point he made earlier in his novel A Bond in the River. While African development has been successful in building great monuments to itself, it has used what the west...
...NAIPAUL COULD have told a very different story about the Ivory Coast. With a relatively high level of national income and one of the continent's best universities, it is one of Black Africa's few economic success stories. But these facts receive scant attention in Naipaul's work. Naipaul is explicit about his choices of subject. He travels to a country to find the interplay of new facades and old structures; his writing is cultural anthropology applied to journalism or fiction...
...some ways, the choice of subject becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Naipaul wants to find the worm in the apple, he is a good enough investigative reporter to do it. So readers hear about the headhunters and meet the Crocodiles. Naipaul describes his journalistic style as realistic, and he's right. But his realism is selective. There may be something rotten in Abidjan, but there's a lot of good Naipaul isn't telling us about...
...essays in Finding the Center are drawn from very different periods in Naipaul's writing career, but the contrast is not merely one of youthfulness and experience. Naipaul didn't just become a better writer, he also became more jaded. We first see him as a shy novice, passing the manuscript of his first story around the BBC staff room to get comments from older, wiser associates. By contrast, the Naipaul we meet in the Ivory Coast has become a self-assured world traveler who feels confident attributing poor service at an Abidjan restaurant to his suspicion that the European...
...years after he became a writer with his story about Bogart, Naipaul went to Venezuela to look up his first character. He leaves his Caracas hotel one morning to visit the old man in his village in the Orinoco delta. They have a pleasant lunch, but when Naipaul returns to Caracas he finds a telegram from Bogart, a note he had missed that morning, which asks him to cancel his visit. Maybe it should have been a signal to Naipaul that the thousands of air-miles and the hundreds of pages which have come between him and the room...