Word: naipauls
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DIED. Shiva Naipaul, 40, Trinidadian-born, British-educated author and journalist whose much admired work nonetheless had not brought him the renown of his older brother V.S. Naipaul; of a heart attack; in London. His richly detailed, harshly scornful observations of the turmoil and shortcomings of many Third World nations, contained in half a dozen novels and travelogues, including North of South (1978), Journey to Nowhere (1980) and Love and Death in a Hot Country (1983), reflected his own postcolonial rootlessness and search for identity...
...those of her generation--Desai was born in 1937, only a few years after the likes of V.S. Naipaul and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala--foreignness has itself been a driving theme. The classic Desai figure is the title character of her most propulsive novel, 1988's Baumgartner's Bombay, an old-style German long settled in India who comes into fatal contact with a younger German of the mobile, backpacking generation. Nowadays, when millions are living in places not fully their own, foreignness is nothing to write home about. The characters in Ali's and Lahiri's fiction might...
...similarly limited vision marks Naipaul's two books on Islam?Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998). His thesis is provocative: Islam is a manifestation of Arab civilization that has spread through Arab conquest. Wherever it has spread in Asia?Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia?it has cut off its converts from their own heritage, history and culture and made them revere the civilization of their conquerors. He certainly gathers a fair amount of evidence to support his case: in Pakistan, for example, he observes that people invented fake genealogies tracing themselves back to Arab ancestors...
...Naipaul's insistence that Asian Muslims are trapped in their history also blinds him to the possibility that situations might change. He recently told the (London) Observer that "there are certain countries which foment [religious war], and they probably should be destroyed, actually." Asked if he meant Saudi Arabia, Naipaul replied: "I would like to think so, yes," adding that Iran "has to be dealt with, too." Naipaul ignores evidence that Iran is going through a tremendous internal struggle, that Tehran's free-thinkers, women's activists and civil libertarians daily challenge the power of the mullahs who rule their...
...fiction, Naipaul's vision is more profound. Whether it is a character like Biswas, whom he created when in his 20s, or Willie Chandran, whom he first dreamed up when in his 60s, Naipaul's fictional heroes are among the most complex in modern literature. Naipaul's strengths as a writer reach far beyond the concerns of the colonial and postcolonial. As Half a Life and Magic Seeds prove, his greatest gift is that he can unlock the closed cabinet of the male psyche and take out so much that is hidden inside: how it hits a man one evening...