Word: shiva
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Vidia, as he is known to friends, operates at a high level of stress. It may be genetic, he suggests, sadly recalling that his brother Shiva, the novelist and journalist, wrote him shortly before he died of a heart attack three years ago at the age of 40 that "anxiety was his truest feeling." Apprehension also comes with the territory. Naipaul was born an outsider 56 years ago in the British colony of Trinidad. A member of neither the white ruling class nor the black majority, he was part of the island's large, self-contained Indian community...
...lobby of Building No. 391 at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory near San Francisco stands a cast-iron sculpture of Shiva, the multiarmed god whose whirligig dances, according to Hindu tradition, alternately create and destroy all earthly life. Near by is a wood-and-plastic model of Nova, the world's most powerful laser, which is housed in cavernous quarters the size of a football field. The juxtaposition of the two objects is apt, and for several reasons. Like Shiva, the $176 million laser bristles with its equivalent of arms: ten bright blue tubes, each a conduit for an intense laser beam...
...series of more ambiguous abstractions. But a skeletal frieze has been retained along the frame to specify the note of mortal dread. Similarly, in 1979 Jasper Johns embedded a train of cutlery along the perimeter of Dancers on a Plane, inspired by musings on the multiarmed Hindu god Shiva. "I was thinking about many-handedness," Johns explains. "I made the association with the handling of utensils, and put them along the edge to suggest that the painting had some meaning beyond pure abstraction...
Nothing of the sort will happen, of course, and Naipaul never suggests otherwise. He concentrates instead on the ways his three main Shiva Naipaul characters find to defend themselves against intractable reality...
Readers acquainted with the works of V.S. Naipaul, the author's older brother, may find such condemnations of the Third World familiar. Shiva's views seem harsher, more absolute and, in consequence, less intellectually engaging. But his portrait of a land sinking back into savagery is deft and diverting, a vividly colored paradigm of despair...