Word: naipaul
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Naipaul gives three cheers for the legacy of Western civilization, but not a hoot for the romanticizers of the Third World...
Friends say that Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul often talks in bis, a reference to the musical notation for "repeat phrase." But what could be mistaken for an affectation is actually a ritual of concentration that is performed on something as simple as the way a lintel rests on an ancient pillar or as complex as how the past weighs on the present...
...burdens of history are balanced in the pages of Naipaul's many books and published daily on his mobile face. The muscles for consternation, annoyance, mirth, sadness, disappointment and disdain are well developed. A lifetime overcoming obscurity, asthma and anxiety among strangers in strange lands has taught him to expect the worst. His autobiographical writings toll with such gloomy remarks as "To see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament." To a visitor who has just blown through 10 1/2 time zones to arrive promptly for a meeting in Madras...
...course, our markings may be simply a matter of aesthetics. Popping in a comma can be like slipping on the necklace that gives an outfit quiet elegance, or like catching the sound of running water that complements, as it completes, the silence of a Japanese landscape. When V.S. Naipaul, in his latest novel, writes, "He was a middle-aged man, with glasses," the first comma can seem a little precious. Yet it gives the description a spin, as well as a subtlety, that it otherwise lacks, and it shows that the glasses are not part of the middle-agedness...
...Naipaul writes that when he was young he did not realize that "[m]an and writer were the same person. But that is a writer's greatest discovery. It took time--and how much writing!--to arrive at that synthesis." It seems he has lost it again...