Word: naipaul
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...term used so often to praise Naipaul's journalism is that it is "prophetic"?that he saw in the 1960s and '70s, before anyone else did, that a series of crises was about to hit Africa and India; then in the 1980s and '90s he saw that trouble was brewing in the Islamic world. Naipaul's journalism of crisis was engaged most profoundly with India. On his first visit there, in 1962, Naipaul found the country "an endless repetition of exhaustion and decay." When he came back to India in 1967, he wrote: "The absurdity of India can be total...
...might also have observed significant flashes of hope: that India was opening engineering colleges that would soon become the world's best, that it was solving its food-shortage problems, that it was even launching a space program. Its free press and parliamentary system?far from having collapsed, as Naipaul said?re-emerged triumphantly in 1977, when democracy was re-established. Yet Naipaul, who is praised for seeing things so clearly, saw none of India's strengths. Although his vision of the country has grown progressively more sympathetic, the idea that India's economy would one day become...
...Before he began his second career as a journalist, a man who tries to describe the world as it is, Naipaul had already made a name for himself as a novelist, a man who makes things up. He was a Trinidadian of Indian ethnicity who wrote novels that were mostly about Indians living in the Caribbean or Africa. The ancestors of these Indians, who had followed traditional ways of living, had not equipped their sons for the political or sexual complexities of the modern era. Without help from their past or their culture, Naipaul's heroes struggled against the world...
...hero of the new novel, Willie Chandran, spent most of Half a Life being another of Naipaul's "mimic men"?his term for a person from a former European colony (India, in this case) who has grown up without knowing how to live, except by aping his erstwhile rulers. Willie has done one smart thing early in life: he escaped from India and landed in London?for Naipaul, the center of civilization, and the best place on earth to make a real man of yourself, which is the goal toward which he urges all his fictional characters. Willie, alas, keeps...
...make a man of himself, and he figures he'll do it by fighting for a good cause. Almost as soon as he joins the guerrillas, he realizes he has made a mistake: he has fallen in among murderers and terrorists. In the chapters that follow, Naipaul sketches brilliant psychological portraits of the guerrillas?you understand that one man has joined the movement out of sexual rage, another because he can find no other job, and a third simply because he is bored?and you begin to feel sorry for them. Willie falls into the same trap as the reader...