Word: naipauls
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Given his background, Naipaul was bound to wind up at loggerheads with people who renounce logic, humanism, skeptical inquiry and the notion of progress...
...Naipaul Knopf; 430 pages...
What do the militant Muslims really want? This question, which began to vex the West with special urgency as the Iranian revolution unfolded, piqued the curiosity of V.S. Naipaul. Instead of simply clucking in wonder, he decided to look for an answer at the source. He mapped out a six-month itinerary that only a journalist or a masochist could love. In August 1979, it was off to Iran, a nation still rejoicing in the fall of the Shah, still tumultuous under the evolving rule of Khomeini. Then to Pakistan, the troubled state founded in 1947 as a homeland...
...found plenty of them, thanks in part to his physiognomy. Naipaul's Indian heritage made him appear sympathetic to some who might otherwise have mistrusted him. Ayatullahs in Qum found his looks puzzling but nonthreatening; in Pakistan he was taken for a Pakistani; a teacher in Indonesia remarked admiringly: "You look like our Prophet." Such appearances were deceiving. Naipaul is a man of the West, through and through. He may have grown up as an alien in Trinidad, then a British colony, but his escape from that subjugation came not through mysticism or political revolution but through secular education...
...would be hard to think of an artist who better deserved all this effort. Rodin had no successful followers because, as V.S. Naipaul once remarked of Charles Dickens, "the very magnitude of his vision, its absorption into myth, precluded as grand an attempt." There would, of course, be great sculptors after Rodin, but none of them, not even Henry Moore, was able to release such torrents of expressive power from the sole image of the human body. Pathos, energy, despair, entropic exhaustion, orgasmic pleasure: every shade of meaning, every opposed sensation that the body can display, found its way into...