Word: trinidad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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. As a child, he lived a Hindu village life in the country. In Port- of-Spain during World War II, he experienced a polyglot street life...
...similar expression flickers when Naipaul assesses his own career. "I really don't have a success story to tell," he begins. "My story is one of slog and grind and disappointment and overcoming." Growing up in Trinidad "among advertisements for things that were no longer made," Naipaul rebelled against the prevailing backwater mentality. His model was his father, a journalist who tried to bring new ideas to his insular community. Seepersad Naipaul died in 1953, a defeated man of 47. Yet, as his son has written, "he made the vocation of the writer seem the noblest in the world...
...provincial and embarrassing, they offered themselves to high culture, only to discover that they had shut the door on their best material. "I was a man who had no idea of what to write about," says Naipaul of his early literary efforts in London. Turning his imagination back to Trinidad released his gift and led to his first successes, lighthearted novels and stories about his island society...
Later books grew out of the need for fresh subjects. "England is not laid out like Trinidad. Its life goes on behind closed doors," he notes. "To get material, I've had to travel." What Naipaul conveyed in nonfiction such as An Area of Darkness and The Loss of El Dorado and in his novels Guerrillas and A Bend in the River changed Western perceptions of the underdeveloped world. Free of their colonial keepers, new nations had to confront their own hearts of darkness. In Africa the author found tribalism overgrowing hopes of progress; in India he observed that poverty...
...says with a hint of dread. "When I'm finished, I do nothing. It takes a week before I even begin to feel tired." To keep in shape, he performs a daily exercise taught to him years ago by a family pundit in Trinidad. It is a difficult yoga bend that leaves the writer arched backward with his head on the floor...