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FINDING THE CENTER

TWO NARRATIVES

Though some of his early fiction is autobiographical, Naipual seems uncomfortable when writing about himself—and the first of the two pieces here, "Prologue to an Autobiography," is a circuitous account of "my literary beginnings and the imaginative promptings of my many-sided background." Naipaul starts with the mid-1950s day when he drafted his first publishable story, writing in a room at London's BBC and nervously showing the pages to three encouraging young colleagues. ("Such anxiety; such ambition.") The story's subject-matter—his childhood street, the adventurous yearnings of a family friend named "Bogart"—lead him back to memories of Trinidad; his literary strivings lead him back to memories of his tormented father, a sometime journalist (whose old clippings inspired V.S. to love "the idea of print") and unpublished story-writer—whose longest tale became "the greatest imaginative experience" of his childhood. ("Every new bit was read out to me, every little variation; and I read every new typescript my father made as the story grew.") But then Naipaul goes on to record how all of his childhood notions had to be revised, often as part of the discovery-process involved in writing. For his career, that "noble thing," he felt he had to leave the limited culture of Trinidad's Indian community—but actually "it was necessary to go back." Likewise, a 1970s reunion with the once-adventurous Bogart character—who fled Trinidad for cosmopolitan Venezuela only to find dreariness and rootlessness—underlines the difficulty of leaving a native tradition behind. And finally the focus returns to the journalist-father—as Naipual discovers new facts about him in the 1970s: his progressive ideas, which earned him the hostility of his strict, devout Hindu family ("a totalitarian organization"); a dreadful humiliation, when he was forced to kowtow to tribal magic (an actual N. Y. Herald Tribune headline, 6/24/33: "REPORTER SACRIFICES GOAT TO MOLLIFY HINDU GODDESS"); and the mental instability that ensued—a panic that Naipaul now links to the "center" of his own not-so-simple ambition. The second piece, "The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro," picks up on this theme of tribal magic vs. European-style progress—and runs it into the ground somewhat. Naipaul visits the Ivory Coast, one of West Africa's success stories: economic health, benevolent dictator/one-party system, skyscrapers. But, in talking to several residents (including two intriguingly displaced West Indian women), he finds that the Africans still live more in the spirit-world than the Europeans' "real" one—with magic and ritual symbolized by the sacred crocodiles outside the Presidential Palace, fed on live chickens in public ceremonies. Still, if Naipaul belabors this familiar theme (with its implicit distaste for tribal ways), the travelogue is rich in edgy people and shrewd background-details. And though "Prologue to an Autobiography" is too self-consciously structured to be affecting, its curious/charming fragments provide rare personal close-ups of a major writer.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1984

ISBN: 0140073957

Page Count: 159

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1984

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

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