Word: naipaul
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Seventeen Original Hits, Springsteen's The River and Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. And anyone who's scandalized by such an idea . . . well, they just haven't been listening. Try this simple test at home. Ask what made more sense to your life: any novel by V.S. Naipaul or any record by Bob Dylan. Any voters for Naipaul probably wouldn't have read this...
...Naipaul is English not so much by an accident of history as by personal acts ^ of intelligence and will. Thirty-eight years in Britain have given him a proper accent, a direct way with service staff and an impatience with romantic abstraction. He has a British wife, Patricia, with whom he shares a house in Salisbury, not far from Stonehenge and a military training area from which distracting gunfire can frequently be heard...
England is where he writes -- slowly. A good day at a recently acquired computer is 400 words. If he produces more, he notes with a laugh, he invariably writes less the following day. On average it takes Naipaul about a year to compose a book. "I'm with it all the time, anxious to get to the end," he says with a hint of dread. "When I'm finished, I do nothing. It takes a week before I even begin to feel tired." To keep in shape, he performs a daily exercise taught to him years ago by a family...
Despite his complaints, Naipaul's curiosity remains unflagging. "I'm so dazzled by the richness of the world that I think fiction is not quite catching it," says the author whose own novels are exceptions. Naipaul is a constant reader, although he admits to rarely finishing a book. He dislikes the prose of Gibbon and the King James Bible because he finds it too smooth. He prefers the rich accents of the Elizabethans. "My writing is full of helpless echoes of Shakespeare," he confesses. He listens to the tapes of the sonnets at dinner and reads the dramas at night...
Critics generally agree that Naipaul's fortunes are on a permanent foundation. Irving Howe, no pushover, says, "There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him." Alfred Kazin calls Naipaul the "most compelling master of social truth that I know." The writer himself is not overly responsive to praise. He claims to dislike interviews and awards and describes himself simply as a "maker of books." Though England is his base and spiritual home, he prefers the convenience and anonymity of large hotels and jetliners where, 30,000 ft. above the chaos, he can clasp a pillow to his stomach...