Finding the Center: Two Narratives by V. S. Naipaul

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Publishers Weekly

In the essay, ``Prologue to an Autobiography,'' Naipaul recounts his beginnings as a writer and renders a touching portrait of his father. In ``The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,'' a study of the Ivory Coast, he delineates two sections of the modern African mind: the Westernized ``day'' mind and that of the ageless, magic-haunted ``night.'' PW called both narratives ``small works of art.'' January

Biography

In awarding V. S. Naipaul the Nobel prize for literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy called him a "literary circumnavigator" and a "modern philosophe." Both tags seem spot-on, given Naipaul's gift for describing -- in both his fictional and nonfictional studies of India, Africa, and beyond -- the humor and pathos of cultural collisions.