Word: naipauls
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...mountain passages of this part of the world were like the bloody birth canals of civilization. Today Glazebrook finds mostly shards and indifferent descendants. Like VS. Naipaul, the best of contemporary novelist-travel writers, he takes a melancholy view of lands that are past their primes. In the city of Kenya he discovers a universal shabbiness imposed by the use of concrete: "The Asiatics' love of bright colors, too, is betrayed by the plastic paint they slap on everywhere, which flakes and peels as the colors of their native fabrics and tiles never did." A few passages border...
NONFICTION: Bloods, Wallace Terry The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944, Lucjan Dobroszycki, Editor ∙Finding the Center, V.S. Naipaul ∙ "The Good War," Studs Terkel ∙The Weaker Vessel, Antonia Fraser ∙ Writers at Work, George Plimpton, Editor
Finding the Center moves away from the invective of the Muslim book and restores to his nonfiction the considerable sympathy and understanding for characters that Naipaul has shown in his ten novels. Indeed, Naipaul calls the two prose works that make up this new vol ume "personal narrative pieces" rather than essays, and the term seems correct. His emphasis in both falls not on report age but on the process of shaping experiences into a coherent story, of creating a tale, in essence, in order to get at a truth...
...writer. The first sentence of what would prove to be his first published novel (Miguel Street) spontaneously occurred to him while he was doing freelance work for the British Broadcasting Corp. in London, not long after coming down from Oxford. Using BBC typewriter and paper, the young Naipaul wrote: "Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, 'What happening there, Bogart?' " This small scene came from Trinidad and Port of Spain and the crowded, colorful street where Naipaul spent part of his childhood. In later years, with...
After finishing this sentimental journey in prose, an apparently mellowed Naipaul went to the Ivory Coast. At the beginning of the second narrative, he explains his chosen itinerary: "I wanted to be in West Africa, where I had never been; I wanted to be in a former French territory in Africa; and I wanted to be in an African country which, in the mess of black Africa, was generally held to be a political and economic success." The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro displays his idiosyncratic methods of assessing a strange place: serendipitous encounters with local people, from college professors to taxi...