Word: naipaul
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MIGUEL STREET, by V. S. Naipaul (222 pp.; Vanguard; $3.95), recalls the fact that, by some twist of mind or diet, the inhabitants of Trinidad speak English in a way that startles and delights the ear. They have this in common with nonprofessional speakers of Irish English (the barroom Irish of Manhattan's Third Avenue are tedious professionals) and with the talkers of Elizabethan England, if their playwrights bear true witness. In writing about such magnificent lingoists, color threatens to overwhelm shape, as it very nearly did in Naipaul's roguish first novel, The Mystic Masseur. In these...
...unwashed world by getting a job driving a bus, hauling his passengers five miles beyond the city, and then forcing them to get out and bathe. There is Man-Man, who writes random words in the street, repeating a vowel for several blocks if he likes its looks. Author Naipaul, a native of Trinidad, understands well that his comical characters do not live comic lives, and his best sketches are shaded with compassion. When police drag a much-admired fraud named Bogart off to jail for nonsupport, his friend Hat gives an eloquent explanation of why Bogart had left...
...character thus introduced by Novelist Naipaul (rhymes with highball) belongs to that growing family of ex-colonial heroes who have their feet firmly planted in the muck of local tradition and their heads lifted to the sweet smell of Western excess. But where such literary antecedents as E.M. Forster's Dr. Aziz and Evelyn Waugh's Emperor Seth burned with a hard heathen shame, Ganesh shoulders the white-collar burden with the happy ease of a born...
Like Novelist Naipaul, a Trinidad-born Hindu, Ganesh glows with a Messianic conviction that "the day go come when you go be proud to tell people that you did know Ganesh." Dazzled by the arcane wonders of the printed word, he embarks on a brief but disastrous career teaching in a district school, goes on to write a book: 101 Questions and Answers on the Hindu Religion. ("Q. What is Hinduism? A. Hinduism is the religion of the Hindus. Q. Why am I a Hindu? A. Because my parents and grandparents were Hindus.") Eventually Ganesh stumbles on his true mission...
...Novelist Naipaul's leisurely plot is often too clotted with local color, and he rings too many changes on a basically simple theme. But his picture of Ganesh, the huckster Hindu, is the best job of its kind since Joyce Gary looked through the wambly brown eyes of Mister Johnson...