Word: naipauls
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...Naipaul...
...last book on India, V.S. Naipaul wrote that the country's survival depended on seeing the past as dead "or the past will kill." In that volume, India: A Wounded Civilization, as well as in his earlier work on the subcontinent, An Area of Darkness, the Trinidad-born writer of Indian descent scorched the landscape of subcontinent society, indicting the rigidities of a country that preserved the evils of the Hindu caste system and endured a suffocating bureaucracy. Now Naipaul has returned to India more than 10 years later to discover that the past is being left behind...
...Seventeen Original Hits, Springsteen's The River and Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. And anyone who's scandalized by such an idea . . . well, they just haven't been listening. Try this simple test at home. Ask what made more sense to your life: any novel by V.S. Naipaul or any record by Bob Dylan. Any voters for Naipaul probably wouldn't have read this...
Despite his complaints, Naipaul's curiosity remains unflagging. "I'm so dazzled by the richness of the world that I think fiction is not quite catching it," says the author whose own novels are exceptions. Naipaul is a constant reader, although he admits to rarely finishing a book. He dislikes the prose of Gibbon and the King James Bible because he finds it too smooth. He prefers the rich accents of the Elizabethans. "My writing is full of helpless echoes of Shakespeare," he confesses. He listens to the tapes of the sonnets at dinner and reads the dramas at night...
Critics generally agree that Naipaul's fortunes are on a permanent foundation. Irving Howe, no pushover, says, "There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him." Alfred Kazin calls Naipaul the "most compelling master of social truth that I know." The writer himself is not overly responsive to praise. He claims to dislike interviews and awards and describes himself simply as a "maker of books." Though England is his base and spiritual home, he prefers the convenience and anonymity of large hotels and jetliners where, 30,000 ft. above the chaos, he can clasp a pillow to his stomach...