Word: naipauls
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...Naipaul Knopf; 176 pages...
...Among the Believers (1981), his most recent book of nonfiction, V.S. Naipaul displayed a few early symptoms of self-parody. The Muslim fundamentalists he met on his travels through Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia sorely tried his patience. They did not seem impressed by his example of success: an Indian born and raised in Trinidad, then a British colony, who had won a scholarship to Oxford and afterward, as an admirable writer, earned much favor in Western eyes. All that those mullahs and ayatullahs seemed to want was to make trouble and pray. Naipaul's report on this journey...
...some ways, the choice of subject becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Naipaul wants to find the worm in the apple, he is a good enough investigative reporter to do it. So readers hear about the headhunters and meet the Crocodiles. Naipaul describes his journalistic style as realistic, and he's right. But his realism is selective. There may be something rotten in Abidjan, but there's a lot of good Naipaul isn't telling us about...
...essays in Finding the Center are drawn from very different periods in Naipaul's writing career, but the contrast is not merely one of youthfulness and experience. Naipaul didn't just become a better writer, he also became more jaded. We first see him as a shy novice, passing the manuscript of his first story around the BBC staff room to get comments from older, wiser associates. By contrast, the Naipaul we meet in the Ivory Coast has become a self-assured world traveler who feels confident attributing poor service at an Abidjan restaurant to his suspicion that the European...
...years after he became a writer with his story about Bogart, Naipaul went to Venezuela to look up his first character. He leaves his Caracas hotel one morning to visit the old man in his village in the Orinoco delta. They have a pleasant lunch, but when Naipaul returns to Caracas he finds a telegram from Bogart, a note he had missed that morning, which asks him to cancel his visit. Maybe it should have been a signal to Naipaul that the thousands of air-miles and the hundreds of pages which have come between him and the room...