Word: naipaul
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...NAIPAUL's is an immensely articulate voice of concern, sensitive to the dilemmas of developing countries but not sympathetic to what he finds there. The Return of Eva Peron is a short collection of essays that chronicle Naipaul's visits to Argentina, Trinidad and Zaire in 1972-75, and his distress at the lack of respect these nations pay their history. He travels through African bushlands and interviews Argentine intellectuals in his obsessive search for a historical account that suits...
...each country, Naipaul runs across the same problem: imperialism dies hard. Imperial powers left scars on the cultures as well as the economies of their colonies. With acute powers of observation, Naipaul isolates their lingering presences in the rhetoric of Third World leaders. They are entertainers who distract their followers from facing the problems of development. Their songs use borrowed words: angry, anti-imperialist jargon grafted on to desires for a Western, consumer economy...
NONFICTION: And No Birds Sang, Farley Mowat ∙Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Carl E. Schorske Maugham, Ted Morgan ∙Misia, Arthur Gold & Robert Fizdale ∙Show People, Kenneth Tynan ∙The Last Nomad, Wilfred Thesiger ∙The Return of Eva Perón, V.S. Naipaul...
...Naipaul looks out over the fertile pampas and sees degeneration and illusion. Even Argentina's most famous citizen, Jorge Luis Borges, "a great writer, a sweet and melancholy poet," is seen as clinging to a bogus past of noble battles fought for the establishment of the fatherland. Meanwhile, the sons and daughters of settlers from England and the Continent live behind the façade of European culture and are slowly brutalized...
...Naipaul obviously reveres the institutions of European culture and is deeply disturbed when he finds them mimicked. His is the fierce attachment of the immigrant, the brilliant Trinidad-born Indian who left his small island to become a British literary star. Out of that background he has forged his strange and isolated role: the writer of society with no society to call...