Word: naipauls
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...YOUNG V.S. Naipaul made many mistakes. Upon his arrival in New York City for a short stay, a taxi driver cheated him out of almost all his money--surely an understandable mistake for a naive young traveller to make. Nevertheless, Naipaul confesses to have "felt this humiliation so keenly that memory blurred it soon; and then eradicated it for many years...
...Naipaul...
...Naipaul catches two fleeting glimpses of his landlord, but makes no attempt to meet him. The tenant is content with accidental information, the secondhand knowledge that he lives in the immediate vicinity and under the aegis of a bizarre depressive. The owner, rendered "more mysterious" by random images, takes his place in the writer's imaginative life, an intriguing possibility: "We were -- or had started -- at opposite ends of wealth, privilege, and in the hearts of different cultures...
...standard of much current fiction, these events sound like small potatoes indeed, stuff to get out of the way before the corporate takeover or the bedroom marathon. But Naipaul manages to give each isolated incident the ! inevitability and gravity of history. The impression is not that so little happens in ten years but that a series of small upheavals so shake a tiny, isolated corner of the world. Having found, after some 40 years of struggle, his ideal landscape, Naipaul must watch its deterioration and decline. He can, within reason, be philosophical about this process, acknowledging that his sense...
...itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memories." The conclusion to be drawn from The Enigma of Arrival is both heartbreaking and bracing: the only antidote to destruction -- of dreams, of reality -- is remembering. As eloquently as anyone now writing, Naipaul remembers...