Word: naipaul
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Naipaul Knopf; 430 pages...
What do the militant Muslims really want? This question, which began to vex the West with special urgency as the Iranian revolution unfolded, piqued the curiosity of V.S. Naipaul. Instead of simply clucking in wonder, he decided to look for an answer at the source. He mapped out a six-month itinerary that only a journalist or a masochist could love. In August 1979, it was off to Iran, a nation still rejoicing in the fall of the Shah, still tumultuous under the evolving rule of Khomeini. Then to Pakistan, the troubled state founded in 1947 as a homeland...
...would be hard to think of an artist who better deserved all this effort. Rodin had no successful followers because, as V.S. Naipaul once remarked of Charles Dickens, "the very magnitude of his vision, its absorption into myth, precluded as grand an attempt." There would, of course, be great sculptors after Rodin, but none of them, not even Henry Moore, was able to release such torrents of expressive power from the sole image of the human body. Pathos, energy, despair, entropic exhaustion, orgasmic pleasure: every shade of meaning, every opposed sensation that the body can display, found its way into...
...sounded like a sitcom version of The Dogs of War, after rewrites by V.S. Naipaul and Woody Allen. Even the feds joked about a "Bayou of Pigs." Ten men, mostly Southerners and mostly Ku Klux Klan members, were arrested last week by federal agents at a marina near New Orleans and charged with organizing an expedition against a friendly nation...
...Chatwin is no V.S. Naipaul balefully chronicling the political travesties of the Third World. His book is both a luminous historical document and an exploitation of the surreal past. The author's talent for invoking history's black magic is evident in this description of the interior of a rotting Da Silva house: "Dom Francisco's wardrobe, held together by its paint surface alone, lasted until 1957, when it collapsed, revealing a wreckage of whalebone stays and shreds of black taffeta that fluttered upwards like flakes of carbonized paper Bruce Chatwin . . . the pictures were...