Word: naipaul
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...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's panoramic description of his neighbors and surroundings is overdone. He seems obsessed with the village's landscape, describing the land and people the way English romantics have done for centuries. He is once again writing what he is "supposed" to write instead of giving us some penetrating new insight...
Such excessively poetic descriptions soon become tiresome, the moreso because Naipaul keeps on repeating them. In one paragraph, for example, he tells us three times that hay is warm and golden...
...SUCH repetitions were not enough to bore us, the book jumps around in time so much that in order to refresh our memories before adding something new, Naipaul retells--often--what he already has told us hundreds of pages earlier. Besides irritating the reader, this practice drags down what could otherwise be a beautiful description of the English countryside...
...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...