Word: naipaul
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...NAIPAUL's is an immensely articulate voice of concern, sensitive to the dilemmas of developing countries but not sympathetic to what he finds there. The Return of Eva Peron is a short collection of essays that chronicle Naipaul's visits to Argentina, Trinidad and Zaire in 1972-75, and his distress at the lack of respect these nations pay their history. He travels through African bushlands and interviews Argentine intellectuals in his obsessive search for a historical account that suits...
...each country, Naipaul runs across the same problem: imperialism dies hard. Imperial powers left scars on the cultures as well as the economies of their colonies. With acute powers of observation, Naipaul isolates their lingering presences in the rhetoric of Third World leaders. They are entertainers who distract their followers from facing the problems of development. Their songs use borrowed words: angry, anti-imperialist jargon grafted on to desires for a Western, consumer economy...
...problem of writing history dominates the book. Imperialism robbed all the countries Naipaul writes about of histories uniquely their own. That's important, but for Naipaul to focus on it displays an unspoken Western faith in the ability of history to clarify present problems. The conditions of colonization shaped the identity, the problems of each country. It puzzles Naipaul that he finds no analysis of these conditions. Why is there no mention of the Arab slave trade in Zaire? Where are accounts of the genocide which wiped the Argentine pampas clear of Indians...
...speaks to terrorists, to businessmen and government officials to find an acceptable history. But even Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina's man of letters, fails him. Borges' writing is a series of intellectual games that strip away, rather than analyze, the meaning of words. "There is no history in Argentina," Naipaul concludes. "There are no archives; there are only graffiti, polemics and school lessons." He goes on to find history "less an attempt to record and understand than a habit of reordering inconvenient facts; it is a process of forgetting." Naipaul understands that Eva Peron, the brunette who dyed her hair...
NONFICTION: And No Birds Sang, Farley Mowat ∙Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Carl E. Schorske Maugham, Ted Morgan ∙Misia, Arthur Gold & Robert Fizdale ∙Show People, Kenneth Tynan ∙The Last Nomad, Wilfred Thesiger ∙The Return of Eva Perón, V.S. Naipaul...