Word: naipaul
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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LIKE NO OTHERS writer since Conrad, V.S. Naipaul has been able to capture the spirit of the world's less visited places. Throughout his 30 year career, the writer has remained true to a unique vision of the Third World. He understands the intangible clash of cultures that accompanies the application of Western ways to primitive societies. His books, both novels and journalistic travel accounts, offer a melange of modernity and mysticism which captures the cultural dislocation development has brought to the world's more backward corners...
...think that Naipaul's rare gift would have earned him a measure of popularity, and they have. But his approach has also made him very controversial, disliked by these who resent his ability to strip away the hope that accompanies development. His dark vision of the prospects for true growth have not won him many fans among those who feel that he condemns the process of national modernization because of its intermediate results...
...latest work, Finding the Center, is unlikely to quell the controversy, but as a work of self-exploration it may help both sides to understand the subject. In Finding the Center, Naipaul explains himself and sad his method through two very different essays. The first, "Prologue to an Autobiography," is an account of Naipaul's background in Trinidad as the son and grandson of Indian immigrants. Growing up in an Indian household in a British colony just off the coast of a Spanish country, it is easy to see where Naipaul developed his interest in the overlay of different lands...
...book's second essay, "The Crocodiles of Yamoussourko," that may reveal the most about Naipaul--more, in fact, than he may have intended. The Naipaul we meet in the first essay is, by his own admission, an innocent. The essay begins with his first moment of artistic creation--a sentence about a family black sheep named Bogart. He wrote the sentence, the first line of his first story, in a BBC staff room in London 30 years...
Readers acquainted with the works of V.S. Naipaul, the author's older brother, may find such condemnations of the Third World familiar. Shiva's views seem harsher, more absolute and, in consequence, less intellectually engaging. But his portrait of a land sinking back into savagery is deft and diverting, a vividly colored paradigm of despair...