Word: naipauls
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...dazzled by the richness of the world that I think fiction is not quite catching it," V.S. Naipaul said some years ago. The "it," his readers will recognize, is principally the postcolonial world, its tormented past and upheavals that Naipaul has spent most of his career chronicling. It is also what members of the Swedish Academy had in mind when they awarded him this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Naipaul's novels and reportage have helped shape our perceptions of places we hear about only when they are hit by civil wars and famines. His oblique stories about...
...reluctant academic, has been sent to a second-rate college on scholarship. He is baffled by the wider world. He expected the city to have a storybook magnificence. Instead, he finds Buckingham Palace disappointing. "He thought the maharaja's palace in his own state was far grander," writes Naipaul, "and this made him feel, in a small part of his heart, that the Kings and Queens of England were impostors." London's doors do not open easily. Attempts to contact his famous namesake are all met with the same brief note: "Dear Willie Chandran, It was nice getting your letter...
...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...
...bother to note that the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, V.S. Naipaul, is from Trinidad when, as you reported, he has no affinity for his birthplace? I am proud to be from Trinidad and Tobago. I do not romanticize the country, but neither do I denigrate it. Naipaul's attitude shows how well the colonial masters succeeded in their job of brainwashing. I am grateful that for every Naipaul, there is a Trinidadian writer like Earl Lovelace and a calypso musician like David Rudder. SUZETTE DE COTEAU Reading, England
...slightest. This dampening of emotion is surely deliberate, and it makes Half a Life at once more sublime and less enjoyable than Naipaul’s previous works, fiction and nonfiction. Nevertheless, in the category of writers who have examined the colonial condition as a worldwide phenomenon, Naipaul stands almost alone for his quality and seriousness. Next year the Swedish Academy’s honoree will have a tough act to follow, and the literary world may have to break out its umbrellas yet again...