Word: naipaul
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...NAIPAUL...
...journey that ought not to have been made. It had broken my life in two." So wrote V.S. Naipaul, the West Indian novelist (Guerrillas, A House for Mr. Biswas) of East Indian heritage, after his first visit to India in 1962. And so it seemed. He visited the ravaged village in Uttar Pradesh from which his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as an indentured servant more than 60 years before, and fled in horror. He raged and fussed about the Indian bureaucracy. He was appalled by the emaciated bodies and starving dogs, by the filth and public defecation...
...never figured in imperialism or revolution, but who is transformed, or "chewed up," as the whites say, first into the "rotten meat" of miscegenation, then the "bloody meat" of retribution. But if revolutionaries are depraved charlatans, imperialists are incompetent almoners, and revolutions are fitful little altercations, what is Naipaul saying about legitimate struggles for independence from imperialistic, capitalist nations? His focus on the personal problems of his actors--his obsession with Roche's attitude toward authority and Jimmy's sexuality--might be misconstrued as a reactionary response to the larger issues, and an effort to obscure his vision in tiny...
...Naipaul phrases these questions himself in a passage about Roche, who wrote a book about the South African struggle. "You describe individual things very clearly," a commentator says of Roche's book, but it lacks a general point of view on "the most monstrous kind of white aggression against black people." Roche explains clumsily that he became "very confused" while writing, "swamped by all the people I had to write about, and all the little events which I thought important." He was unable to deal with the larger issues. In the Caribbean crisis, Roche has responded in the same...
...Naipaul's vision is different from Roche's because it does not legitimize imperialism or attempt to uphold this fragile mess of relations. By the end of the novel Roche's hopeless and fragile position has made him an unwitting accomplice in the murder of his mistress, and his revolutionary opponent is simply a personal opponent. Just because he reduces his paragons of imperialist and guerrilla to such an individualistic level, Naipaul does not dismiss the issue of imperialism. Imperialism has much more subtle effects, Naipaul indicates, than building slums and mansions and creating racist distinctions. Imperialism twists social relations...