Word: naipauls
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...reader looking for the source of Naipaul's inspiration will be rewarded here, finding in several essays early drafts of episodes that became part of his Indian travel narrative, An Area of Darkness. Many of the details and themes in a long and truly frightening piece, "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad," he turned into his novel Guerrillas. In "A New King for Congo," his meditation on the late Zairean kleptocrat, President Mobutu, he alludes to Heart of Darkness, comparing Conrad's Kurtz to Mobutu: "Seventy years later, at this bend in the river, something like Conrad...
...Behind the Scenes: Kill Bill Movies: So Close Books: Theroux on Naipaul Books: Mysterious Massacre Books: Waylaid in New Jersey...
...collection The Writer and the World, were assignments for magazines and newspapers. They sent him to India to reminisce, to the Caribbean to cover political discontent or crime stories, to America to write about the Republican Convention of 1984, to Africa, South America, and elsewhere. What Naipaul brought to every assignment was his distrust of cant and his own strong opinions...
...long trajectory of Naipaul's writing career is well represented in this book, which spans 40 years. In the first piece, he is a harassed and hard-up Trinidadian traveler in India in 1962. In the last essay he is venerable, addressing rubious generalities on such precepts as the Golden Rule to an august gathering at the Manhattan Institute in New York. His topic: "Our Universal Civilization." In the past, stuck for a book-length subject at home, he hoped to find it abroad as a reporter with a round-trip airfare. Except for one piece, all the essays here...
...Race is a frequent subject in this book, and not a happy one. Naipaul has been praised for being consistent in his crustiness, but his consistency is often little more than the rehashing of tired observations. "They have the Negro openness to new faiths," he writes of the black population of Anguilla. In Belize, "Negroes in jackets and ties?famous throughout Central America for their immunity to disease?walk behind the hearses" and "The Premier is a man of mixed race: Maya Indian, European, some seepage of African." In Mauritius, he insists that the Foreign Minister Gaetan Duval...