Word: naipauls
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...prominent author VS Naipaul wrote in his book of travels to India in 1990 that, “The liberation of spirit that has come to India could not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to come as disturbance...India was now a country of a million little mutinies.” There are big questions to answer for a country that, while proudly trumpeting seven-to-eight percent growth rates each year, also ranked 134th in the Human Development Index in 2009 report. A breathless?...
...impossible to read “North of South,” Shiva Naipaul’s cynical yet deeply moving account of a late 1970s journey through East Africa, without being reminded of the travel writings of his legendary elder brother, V.S. Naipaul. Only 40 when he died of a heart attack in 1985, the unfortunate younger Naipaul cannot escape comparisons to his sibling, older by 13 years and a literary behemoth and Nobel Laureate often described as Britain’s greatest living writer. Shiva Naipaul’s work is more than worthy of notice...
...writer alive has been so fully canonized as V. S. Naipaul. He won the Booker, was knighted, had a great masterpiece published (“Bend In the River”), and won the Nobel Prize (too late, he claimed, for it to make him happy). This year he received the compliment of an accomplished warts-and-all biography (lesser writers receive praise while they’re living, and are damned when they’re dead). But he is miserable. Every time he writes a novel he claims it will be his last—because novels...
Excavating Pat's diary and the writer's own journal and talking to more than a hundred people on several continents, French grippingly develops an account of the writer's life as cool and undeluded as Naipaul's former friend Paul Theroux's was rivetingly emotional. Though he remains deeply sympathetic to Pat, who gave herself over without complaint to a man she was convinced was a genius, French is otherwise as plainspoken as his subject: the critic Clive James is "an ill-favoured Australian humorist." Naipaul's second wife Nadira he calls "dyslexic, emotional, fairly scandalous...
...central question the book raises is how much inhumanity is justified in the cultivation of a talent--especially in an age when (as Naipaul is shrewd enough to realize) writers are judged on the basis of their personality more than their art. Even as he turned himself into a bespoke English gentleman, after all, while Pat became the obedient and self-denying Indian wife of legend, Naipaul's strength lay not just in the clarity of his observations but in the passion--the grief and terror and rage--that trembled just beneath them. When Pat finally died, in 1996, French...