Word: naipauls
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Behind the Scenes: Kill Bill Movies: So Close Books: Theroux on Naipaul Books: Mysterious Massacre Books: Waylaid in New Jersey...
...reigning literary lion of post-Hemingway travel writers is V.S. Naipaul, who won last year's Nobel Prize for Literature. The Writer and the World (Knopf; 524 pages) brings together his best short work, most of which has been languishing uncollected for decades. A native of the tiny island of Trinidad, Naipaul is a travel writer almost by default--he is a foreigner everywhere he goes--and it's a privilege to look through his outsider's X-ray eyes at Mobutu's Zaire, or at a would-be revolutionary in Guyana, or at a holy man in Bombay...
...Naipaul is at his most incisive when he hits closest to what, for Americans, is home: Norman Mailer's quixotic 1969 mayoral campaign in New York City (his slogan: "Get Ready for the Norman Conquest!") or the 1984 Republican Convention in Dallas. It's a little unsettling to be seen as exotic, and that unsettling feeling reminds us that the reason we love to travel and the reason we love to read are the same: to see ourselves clearly. "It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves," De Botton reminds us. "The domestic setting keeps...
...click. So it's surprising and not too convincing when Chandran turns out to have writing talent. He contributes scripts to the BBC and eventually publishes a collection of stories about India. Up to this point, aspects of Willie's life and early career are similar to those of Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent who took a degree at Oxford, worked for the BBC and wrote fiction. Unlike his protagonist, Naipaul learned everything about London and its ways...
...Naipaul has written about defeated men before. But they usually went down with a misguided or ill-fated passion. Willie Chandran simply drifts, usually from woman to woman, in a state of incompleteness. Fortunately, he is a continental drifter who allows Naipaul to revisit familiar ground and again bring to bear his formidable powers as a literary man and journalist. The two disciplines are indistinguishable in Half a Life. But there are clear influences. Naipaul's India could be a setting in an R.K. Nayaran story. His Africa is as baleful as Conrad's and his London Waugh-like. Here...