Word: naipaul
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...hosts a rich daily marketplace of complaints, ranging from tribal members demanding compensation for lost land and farmers seeking better prices for their crops, to demonstrators demanding greater rights for women and gays, and everyone in between. The 18th century observatory is now witness to what the writer V.S. Naipaul called "India's million mutinies" - the dizzying array of fault lines, small and large, that fracture this heterogeneous nation of 1.1 billion...
...better divine auspicious dates for royal enterprises, and to predict the fate of ruler and ruled. Nestled in the heart of New Delhi, Jantar Mantar today is mainly a tourist attraction, although it continues to function as an observatory of sorts - a window into what the writer V.S. Naipaul called "India's million mutinies...
...Writers from earlier periods fare a little better, but not much. Naipaul is a fan of the early Flaubert, whose lightness of touch he admiringly notes in Madame Bovary, but whose later heavy-handedness (in works such as Salammbô) Naipaul describes with rather laborious detail himself. So who does Naipaul like? Maupassant, Twain and "the Russians (with the exception of Turgenev...
...dinner. One is at first amused by all the iconoclasm: After all, why should the reputations of Powell or Chaudhuri matter these days? One then begins to demur: Is Philip Larkin really a "minor" poet? Is the Caribbean really a place of "spiritual emptiness"? Finally one balks completely - at Naipaul's tiresome insistence on referring to the black population of Trinidad as "Negroes," for example, or at his relentless tone of acidity and disdain (India has "no autonomous intellectual life;" both the BBC and Oxford are "provincial and mean and common...
...central puzzle of A Writer's People, in the end, is the unimportance of people to the author of it. The pages are littered with names (Kingsley Amis drinking in London's Fleet Street, or Aldous Huxley watching Gandhi make a speech in India, or Naipaul discussing the Greek playwright Menander with former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan) but names are all that most of them remain - two-dimensional also-rans in Naipaul's literary one-upmanship. The laughing, exuberant and fleshed-out characters that were such a feature of his earlier work have got up from the table...