Word: naipaul
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...think that Naipaul's rare gift would have earned him a measure of popularity, and they have. But his approach has also made him very controversial, disliked by these who resent his ability to strip away the hope that accompanies development. His dark vision of the prospects for true growth have not won him many fans among those who feel that he condemns the process of national modernization because of its intermediate results...
...latest work, Finding the Center, is unlikely to quell the controversy, but as a work of self-exploration it may help both sides to understand the subject. In Finding the Center, Naipaul explains himself and sad his method through two very different essays. The first, "Prologue to an Autobiography," is an account of Naipaul's background in Trinidad as the son and grandson of Indian immigrants. Growing up in an Indian household in a British colony just off the coast of a Spanish country, it is easy to see where Naipaul developed his interest in the overlay of different lands...
...book's second essay, "The Crocodiles of Yamoussourko," that may reveal the most about Naipaul--more, in fact, than he may have intended. The Naipaul we meet in the first essay is, by his own admission, an innocent. The essay begins with his first moment of artistic creation--a sentence about a family black sheep named Bogart. He wrote the sentence, the first line of his first story, in a BBC staff room in London 30 years...
Over the years, however, Naipaul seems to have changed. His earlier works, set mostly in Trinidad, were happier, suffused with an appreciation of the sometimes joyous results of his own cultural mixture. But one could hardly describe Naipaul's recent work as joyous, "The Crocodiles of Yamoussourko," for example, offers a compelling but hopeless view of one of Black Africa's most successful nations. Naipaul echoes in non-fiction a point he made earlier in his novel A Bond in the River. While African development has been successful in building great monuments to itself, it has used what the west...
...NAIPAUL COULD have told a very different story about the Ivory Coast. With a relatively high level of national income and one of the continent's best universities, it is one of Black Africa's few economic success stories. But these facts receive scant attention in Naipaul's work. Naipaul is explicit about his choices of subject. He travels to a country to find the interplay of new facades and old structures; his writing is cultural anthropology applied to journalism or fiction...