AWayintheWorldnaipaul奈保尔世间之路文章详细分析review.docVIP

The distinguished writer V.S. Naipaul opens his new book, A Way in the World[*] - it is his 22nd - with a brief Prelude (subtitled An Inheritance) in which he describes the constant shifting about of reality he experiences whenever he returns home to the island of Trinidad. Reencountering familiar places and people, he finds everything strange and not strange, and the dance of his perceptions gives him a feeling of half-dream, knowing and not knowing a little like the sensations that came to me as a child when once in the rainy season, I had fever. Hybridity Reflecting on this state, Naipaul recalls a story he has heard about a man named Leonard Side, a floral arranger who also works as a dresser of bodies in a Trinidad funeral home and a maker and decorator of pastries. Side is an eccentric, and his decorative tastes seem eccentric: although a Muslim, he keeps an image of Christ in Majesty over his bed. The woman who tells Naipaul this story confesses that each time she sees Side, she runs away from him. It was his idea of beauty that upset me, she explains: That idea of beauty - mixing roses and flowers and nice things to eat with the idea of making the dead human body beautiful too - was contrary to my own idea. The mixing of things upset me I felt his feeling for beauty was like an illness. Naipaul, too, has often expressed dismay at the mixing of things, and he too has fled from the world of Leonard Side. He escaped his native Trinidad - as he likes to say - when he was eighteen, in 1950, to study at Oxford on a scholarship, and he has made his home in England ever since. Returning time and again, in his writings and his travels, to the Caribbean, Africa, and India, he has brought an unsentimental eve and ear to bear on the post-colonial world of his inheritance. His approach has been to sort out, rather than to celebrate, the third-world mixing and fragmentation of cultures, histories, religions, languages, castes, ideologies, and ethnicities. Against thi