Word: naipaul
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...RETURN OF EVA PERÓN, WITH THE KILLINGS IN TRINIDAD by V.S. Naipaul Knopf; 228 pages...
...Naipaul blows his cover as Joseph Conrad's secret agent to the abandoned worlds of imperialism. Naipaul was born in Trinidad of Hindu descent and, like Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski, made England his home. Like Conrad, Naipaul writes of social upheaval, solitude, madness and evil, but as they apply to the colonized, not the colonizers. And he is merciless...
These and other equally withering opinions were written in the early '70s when, between novels, Naipaul visited Trinidad, Zaire, Argentina and Uruguay. The resulting essays are partly coroner's reports on would-be redeemers, partly sources for settings and personality traits that Naipaul later used in his novels. Zaire's Mobutu, with his brew of futurism and ancestor worship, is clearly the model for the remote leader of the Central African nation described in A Bend in the River (1979). The confused longings and demagogy of Michael de Freitas, a Trinidadian cult leader who was hanged...
...Naipaul looks out over the fertile pampas and sees degeneration and illusion. Even Argentina's most famous citizen, Jorge Luis Borges, "a great writer, a sweet and melancholy poet," is seen as clinging to a bogus past of noble battles fought for the establishment of the fatherland. Meanwhile, the sons and daughters of settlers from England and the Continent live behind the façade of European culture and are slowly brutalized...
...Naipaul obviously reveres the institutions of European culture and is deeply disturbed when he finds them mimicked. His is the fierce attachment of the immigrant, the brilliant Trinidad-born Indian who left his small island to become a British literary star. Out of that background he has forged his strange and isolated role: the writer of society with no society to call...