Song of a Reformed Headhunter

A richly detailed portrait of a man who tries so hard to gain some measure of autonomy from a distinctly impoverished background and a stultifying dependent family. Mr. Biswas is not lovable, but he is finally admirable for his ceaseless efforts to find a place of his own. In his quest for a house, he also exposes the place and relations of the Indian people in Trinidad.

Second journey to China, from June 9-30. This time, Beijing was the first leg of the journey, and so I saw it with fresher eyes and spirit. Again, I like visiting the Temple of Heaven most, for its atmosphere of worship, not completely disappeared from the remaining structures. Square Earth, Round Sky. Basic shapes and symmetries. As other tourists left the compound towards the end of the afternoon, the place became ever more quiet, and so recovered its sacrosanct nature. The Summer Palace, which I visited for the first time, was truly impressive, especially for the temple built on a tremendous rectangular rock base, but the Temple of Heaven was much, much older. It was an ancient place of sacrifice. Returning to Kunming felt, to some degree, like returning home, if I could ever feel at home in China. I changed the program so that we would practice tai chi with enthusiasts at Green Lake Park on a Sunday morning. So glad I did. Tai chi was the combination of strength and gentleness th...

V.S. Naipaul was climbing out of a cab when I approached the 92Y. He was a small man and leaned heavily on the arm of his bigger, younger wife. At the Y to promote his latest book The Masque of Africa, he read from the Gambon section, in which a French-educated biracial Gambonese lawyer speaks about the forest at the heart of African religions. Ultra-civilized himself, Naipaul read the account of magical rituals and secret rites in the voice of an interested but detached reporter, conveyed through prose at once transparent and artful. The interview segment was less successful, The interviewer asked convoluted questions but gave Naipaul too little time to respond. The questions were also too abstract. Last night tested Naipaul's faltering memory, but did not give the storyteller a chance to mesmerize.

from A. N. Wilson's review of Patrick French's The World Is What It Is: The authorized biography of V. S. Naipaul : "Doctored truth is not truth", Naipaul said; "I think the completeness of the record is what matters." * As Pat Naipaul saw in her often anguished diaries, the writing life puts an extraordinary strain on anyone who is attempting to share it. There are two sorts of marriage for writers: the ones such as Pat Naipaul's or Vera Nabokov's, where the wife enters, almost sentence by sentence into the writer's composing life; and the other sort, where only by keeping her distance can the writer's partner survive. ("Keep your hearts together and your tents separate", was the well-turned motto of Mrs R. S. Thomas, Elsi Eldridge.) *** from Adam I. P. Smith's review of Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold: Britain, America, and the making of the modern world : His core thesis is that the most important development in the pa...