Word: naipauls
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...writers have made better use of their estrangement than Naipaul. He recently returned to India to gather material for his third book on the subcontinent, and things could be going more smoothly. A recent election in the southern state of Tamil Nadu has been disruptive. Madras' main streets are filled with festive tides of celebrators waving the red-and-black banners of the victorious Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Party. Naipaul is trying to sort out the issues, which include the historic antagonism of South Indians toward traditional Brahman power. Eventually, he will decipher the complexities of culture and politics on paper...
...sorting out takes time and patience. An interview with a local bureaucrat seems to support Naipaul's contention that "everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two." After much difficulty, he has arranged a chat with two Tamil radicals. The pair are escorted to the writer's hotel room by two plainclothesmen. The luxurious Taj Coromandel is overrun by an international gathering of leather-goods manufacturers, and for all anyone can tell, Naipaul and his group could have just concluded an agreement to turn sacred cows into discount luggage. His reaction to the interview...
Rumors that V.S. Naipaul has mellowed are somewhat exaggerated. His testiness seems for the moment to be tempered by weariness. "The mind fills up with so many images," he says, and one is suddenly aware how many of our images of the Third World come from his tightly woven books. He once wrote, "I have no attitudes; no views. I have appetites and reactions, violent reactions." Naipaul claims he is now content to be a quiet listener. Readers looking for a verbal lynching by the leading chronicler of modern folly and delusion may have been disappointed by his recently published...
...road, Naipaul operates largely through honed instinct, avoiding official sources and searching for the obscure informant and off-center incident. Asked why he did not interview Reuben Greenberg, the black Jewish police chief of Charleston, S.C., Naipaul grimaces and says simply, "Too obvious." An ironic comment, considering that Naipaul, also a self-made man of many parts, is now widely considered to be England's greatest living writer. His own faceted history parallels the breakup of colonialism and mass migrations. Of London in the 1950s he says, "I had found myself at the beginning of a great movement of peoples...
...similar expression flickers when Naipaul assesses his own career. "I really don't have a success story to tell," he begins. "My story is one of slog and grind and disappointment and overcoming." Growing up in Trinidad "among advertisements for things that were no longer made," Naipaul rebelled against the prevailing backwater mentality. His model was his father, a journalist who tried to bring new ideas to his insular community. Seepersad Naipaul died in 1953, a defeated man of 47. Yet, as his son has written, "he made the vocation of the writer seem the noblest in the world...