Word: naipauls
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Notes from the Fourth World A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul; Knopf; 288 pages...
...Naipaul is not the sort of writer who needs a metaphor to improve the clarity of his art. Yet this passage from his new novel, A Bend in the River, colors a simple botanical fact with the suggestion of a broader truth. Alex Haley notwithstanding, uprootedness remains the predominant theme of the times. The good modern novelists know this, and Naipaul is one of the best. He is also one of the most exotically unrooted, an Indian, born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, who has spent most of his life in England. Like his friend Paul Theroux (The Great...
...Naipaul's fiction, the landscape, mental as well as actual, has grown ever more terrifying. By contrast, he approaches India with a calm, almost religious detachment. The narrative is often mordant as it describes the dissonance of Indian life: the mutilated beggar children and the fashionable holy men, complete with pressagents; the landless peasants fleeing the villages for the city pavements, the infuriating smugness of the privileged...
Hindu Killer. But the real horror is muted, deriving from the nation's perpetual state of helplessness. Hindu India was all but destroyed by 1,000 years of invasion and defeat, Naipaul believes, and Hinduism has perpetuated the resulting defeatism by encouraging withdrawal and human separation. Moreover, Gandhian nonviolence swiftly degenerated from a framework for social action to total laxity, in Naipaul's view, and helped lead India to "an acceptance of karma, the Hindu killer, the Hindu calm...
...Indira Gandhi's state of emergency, and the book was completed before her dramatic electoral defeat in March. But that hardly matters. If anything, the author seems to have preferred the emergency to the old-style Gandhianism of Morarji Desai, now the Prime Minister. The real crisis, writes Naipaul sadly, is neither political nor economic, but that of a decaying civilization whose "only hope lies in further swift decay." There is no clue as to the shape of the approaching apocalypse; only the chill warning that "the past has to be seen to be dead, or the past will...