Word: naipauls
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...better divine auspicious dates for royal enterprises, and to predict the fate of ruler and ruled. Nestled in the heart of New Delhi, Jantar Mantar today is mainly a tourist attraction, although it continues to function as an observatory of sorts - a window into what the writer V.S. Naipaul called "India's million mutinies...
...Naipaul is no kinder about other writers such as the English novelists Graham Greene and Anthony Powell, the Trinidadian novelist Sam Selvon, or the Bengali pundit and essayist Nirad Chaudhuri, all of whom were his contemporaries. Greene's The Quiet American is dismissed because it presumed a knowledge of Indo-Chinese politics and Naipaul imperiously claims to not be in the habit of reading the newspapers. Anthony Powell was a good friend - in fact, during the 1950s he helped the young and ambitious Naipaul secure work as a book reviewer for the British magazine the New Statesman, and displayed...
...Writers from earlier periods fare a little better, but not much. Naipaul is a fan of the early Flaubert, whose lightness of touch he admiringly notes in Madame Bovary, but whose later heavy-handedness (in works such as Salammbô) Naipaul describes with rather laborious detail himself. So who does Naipaul like? Maupassant, Twain and "the Russians (with the exception of Turgenev...
...dinner. One is at first amused by all the iconoclasm: After all, why should the reputations of Powell or Chaudhuri matter these days? One then begins to demur: Is Philip Larkin really a "minor" poet? Is the Caribbean really a place of "spiritual emptiness"? Finally one balks completely - at Naipaul's tiresome insistence on referring to the black population of Trinidad as "Negroes," for example, or at his relentless tone of acidity and disdain (India has "no autonomous intellectual life;" both the BBC and Oxford are "provincial and mean and common...
...central puzzle of A Writer's People, in the end, is the unimportance of people to the author of it. The pages are littered with names (Kingsley Amis drinking in London's Fleet Street, or Aldous Huxley watching Gandhi make a speech in India, or Naipaul discussing the Greek playwright Menander with former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan) but names are all that most of them remain - two-dimensional also-rans in Naipaul's literary one-upmanship. The laughing, exuberant and fleshed-out characters that were such a feature of his earlier work have got up from the table...