Word: naipaul
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ACCORDING TO SHIVA and V.S. Naipaul, Mistah Kurtz--he ain't dead. His capacity for barbarism is alive in African dictators who act like capricious children in fatigues, and in Australian tourists who visit Africa to prove racism is justified because the natives are so in competent...
...books differ stupendously in their quality, but that's thoroughly explainable. V.S. Naipaul, who is the superior writer, has more experience. He has produced 15 books since 1952, but his diversity in style is more remarkable than his productivity. V.S. Naipaul has mastered social satire, essays on development, historical accounts and pessimistic novels about racial conflict and independence in the Third world. Although writing about disparate societies, Naipaul displays an astute sociological ability to muster and link problems common to all former colonies...
...Bend in the River is in the same genre as Naipaul's later novels-those set in tropical areas where a blacked majority has recently seized power. A Bend takes place in the interior of a guerilla-ridden African nation. It is stifling hot, and the wet bush seems to reinforce the violence lurking in men's souls. An Amin-like dictator rules the nation, periodically purging his national youth guard and murdering potential rebels...
Salim, the protagionist, is an archetypal Naipaul character--East Indian, sallow, passive and alienated. Salim's lethargy reflects his anxiety about the ultimate, senseless violence. As the president's forces creep deeper into the interior, Salim becomes more desperate. He tries twice to rouse himself, via an affair and a flight to London where illusions of a Western civilized arcadia lie. But neither succeeds as a safety-value. Salim renounces all hope and returns to Africa, only to find that the violent abyss has widened...
...Naipaul -Birdy, William Wharton Dubin's Lives, Bernard Malamud Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth Hardwick -Good as Gold, Joseph Heller - SS-GB, Len Deighton -The Best American Short Stories 1978, edited by Ted Solotaroff NONFICTION: Billy Graham, Marshall Frady -Confessions of a Conservative, Garry Wills -The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson -The Medusa and the Snail, Lewis Thomas -The Powers That Be, David Halberstam The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris -To Set the Record Straight, John J. Sirica