Word: naipauls
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...Naipaul's success story is similar to those of other gifted outsiders who have become part of the tradition of English letters. Coming from backgrounds they found provincial and embarrassing, they offered themselves to high culture, only to discover that they had shut the door on their best material. "I was a man who had no idea of what to write about," says Naipaul of his early literary efforts in London. Turning his imagination back to Trinidad released his gift and led to his first successes, lighthearted novels and stories about his island society...
Later books grew out of the need for fresh subjects. "England is not laid out like Trinidad. Its life goes on behind closed doors," he notes. "To get material, I've had to travel." What Naipaul conveyed in nonfiction such as An Area of Darkness and The Loss of El Dorado and in his novels Guerrillas and A Bend in the River changed Western perceptions of the underdeveloped world. Free of their colonial keepers, new nations had to confront their own hearts of darkness. In Africa the author found tribalism overgrowing hopes of progress; in India he observed that poverty...
Such declarations give Naipaul the appearance of a political curmudgeon. But, he says with some surprise, "I don't think that way. People turn things around. I'm for individual rights and for law." It is a long view that includes his fascination with ancient Rome ("I can barely express my admiration for it") and the imperial record of the English. Their achievement calls forth some of his best bis: "Pretty terrific. It would be churlish to say otherwise. It would be foolish to say otherwise. It would be unhistorical to say otherwise...
...Naipaul is English not so much by an accident of history as by personal acts ^ of intelligence and will. Thirty-eight years in Britain have given him a proper accent, a direct way with service staff and an impatience with romantic abstraction. He has a British wife, Patricia, with whom he shares a house in Salisbury, not far from Stonehenge and a military training area from which distracting gunfire can frequently be heard...
England is where he writes -- slowly. A good day at a recently acquired computer is 400 words. If he produces more, he notes with a laugh, he invariably writes less the following day. On average it takes Naipaul about a year to compose a book. "I'm with it all the time, anxious to get to the end," he says with a hint of dread. "When I'm finished, I do nothing. It takes a week before I even begin to feel tired." To keep in shape, he performs a daily exercise taught to him years ago by a family...