Word: naipauls
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Pitilessly astringent, formally exact, observant, pessimistic and skeptical of "progress," Naipaul can also be, at times, intolerably nasty: Who but Naipaul, when asked what the red dot on a Hindu woman's forehead signified, would answer, "It means My head is empty"? Naipaul doesn't suffer fools gladly, and to him the world is full of fools. Fuller, perhaps, than it really is. But he has been known to hit targets that few others would touch at the time: witness, for instance, his scarifying treatment of the ugly pretensions of English "black power" in the 1960s, in The Return...
...nicer ironies of postcolonial English writing that the most evident heir to that great and fearsome archconservative Evelyn Waugh, who famously despised every civilization that had not been subjugated by Rome, should be from the Caribbean. Naipaul is also one of the very few writers to have a whole, book-length cruise missile of a memoir fired at him by a fellow writer. In 1998 Paul Theroux, in a striking fit of Oedipal peevishness, published Sir Vidia's Shadow, painting his former friend and mentor as a self-obsessed, avaricious, pathologically snobbish brute. Perhaps...
...Naipaul...
...Corrections (Farrar Straus; 528 pages; $26) will become that rare thing, a literary work that everybody's reading? A lot of people are saying yes. The season's other anticipated novels include The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer, Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende, Half a Life by V.S. Naipaul and The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa...
...Naipaul's latest book is Between Father and Son: Family Letters (VintageInternational...