Lost in a Landscape of Neglect

...Many of the green-painted wooden benches were no more than rotting stumps embedded in their crumbling concrete platforms...

...Pierre home...

...He hopes to teach her to read and more, but the resentful young woman never adapts to his plan for her personal civilizing...

...The author, a native of Trinidad where blacks and Indians are roughly equal in number, would likely take issue with any notion of racially determined behavior...

...Intense guilt over the family past impels Aubrey to dedicate himself to bringing democracy to Cuyama...

...Pierre, whose marriage is suffering its own parallel decline...

...A haze of litter—banana skins, orange peel, peanut shells, coconut husks, tin cans, bottles, plastic bags— fogged the grassy verge bordering the path...

...Love and Death in a Hot Country draws much of its inspiration from the author's nightmarish trip to Guyana several years ago, recorded in Journey to Nowhere (1980), an extended report on the Jonestown massacre...

...His impassioned letters of concern to the foreign press about human rights abuses and threats to constitutional government are met by disinterest at home and abroad...

...But most impressive is this book's success as fiction...

...Bearing the imprint of Emma Bo-vary, Dina St...

...Emerging from Nai-paul's despairing view of "liberation" is his wondrous, near-poetic description, his acute sensitivity to the complicated interplay of public and private, and his uncanny skill at fashioning realistic people out of circumstances that lead many novelists into wild exaggerations...

...After receiving a university degree she wanders into an empty bookstore, "The Aurora," operated by the idealistic Aubrey St...

...Indeed, their venom approaches hysteria...

...Under changing circumstances accommodations are made even if they are simply admissions of defeat...

...A descendant of slave-holding planters who fled Haiti in the late 18th century, Aubrey opened his store in a particularly blighted quarter of the crumbling capital...

...Reviewed by David D'Arcy The imaginary setting of this vivid, somber novel, Shiva Naipaul's first in 10 years, is an impoverished ex-colony "perched uneasily on the sloping shoulder of South America, a degree or two North of the equator...

...His is a vision of gradual decomposition, tautly revealed in personal histories, the rhythms of daily life and details of the landscape...

...Some revolutionary terminology and bits of conversation reappear exactly as they did in the earlier volume...

...As is often said about struggling young nations, Cu-yama has enormous potential thanks to the untapped resources in the mountains and jungles of its vast hinterlands...

...He is a loving, kindhearted husband, so consumed by self-assigned missions of national salvation that he fails to see his wife's bored dissatisfaction and cold neglect of their child...

...Pierre...

...Similar hatred underlies the novel's action, taking the form of an official ideology that infuses the black characters...

...Moving closer to his distinguished brother's skepticism about human nature, Shiva Naipaul has given us stark-ness amid lushness, politics stillborn in an atmosphere of gloom...

...The slogan, daubed in streaks of red, was repeated at intervals on the asphalt...

...Cuyama's dilapidated capital, Charles-town, is awash in revolutionary slogans —"Kill the Nigger in You," "One Nation One Party One Redeemer"— as the country prepares for a People's Plebiscite designed to "legitimize" the monopoly on political power of a President whose glowing black likeness can be seen everywhere...

...Eventually she offers a paraphrase of the Redeemer's rhetoric: "One day...

...Against his better judgment, he hires her for a job far below her qualifications, Before long, Dina wanders into their marriage and then into motherhood, enduring both with detachment and world-weariness...

...Blackouts are now so common that the people in Charles-town have begun hoarding candles, which, like everything else of value, are in short supply...

...In a moment of innocent decency he makes a gift to the government of a set of valuable engravings that had belonged to his family, believing it should rightfully be in the hands of the Cuyamese people...

...Another attempt to aid his countryfolk has Aubrey easily convincing a destitute family from the shantytowns surrounding Charlestown to let one of their many daughters live and work in the St...

...Nor did it have any patience for the credulous, manipulable Americans, whom the writer held responsible for the phenomenon of Jim Jones...

...There they huddle, "a million people trapped in the sun-stunned vacuum separating ocean from jungle...

...Disgusted by the lavish promises of the electoral masquerade, the St...

...With nowhere else to go, however, she retreats again into her marriage...

...Pierre views her society's distressing developments with alternating incredulity and indifference...

...Instead of emigrating, he resists the President's campaign to dismantle the constitution bequeathed to Cuyama by the British...

...You hear me...

...The asphalt path itself was buckling and cracked and pockmarked with holes...

...Yet virtually all of its mixed population, including blacks, East Indians (here called Hindustanis), landowners of European descent, Syrian shopkeepers and others, have settled along the coast...

...Say Yes To The People And No To The Exploiters...

...Pierre...

...Squatters from outside the capital have taken up residence in the abandoned homes of the upper classes, including Aubrey's late mother's, occasionally planting maize on the front lawns...

...In divergent ways, their lives assume a frustration and incompleteness that obliquely but unmistakably reflects Cuyama's apparently hopeless course...

...Dina, by novel's end, understands that her aloofness toward daughter and mate has the same source as the black rage fueling popular support for the regime: resentment of Cuyama's racist past and the colonial legacy...

...The foreboding permeating Cuyama is hauntingly plausible...

...Sensing an impending cataclysm, the middle and upper class Cuyamese rush to obtain exit visas, to send their money and belongings to safer shores...

...Yet ironically, as Naipaul would have it, the days of that old world were already numbered...

...It's exactly the sort of place where a bookshop like mine is most desperately needed," he says, while admitting that its only paying customers in the largely illiterate country are tourists and members of the diplomatic community...

...But Aubrey's well-intentioned opposition turns out to be harmless, sometimes even comical...

...Naipaul observes in his documentary account that politics in Guyana had a racial basis: Lines were drawn according to deep and often violent hostilities dividing the black and Indian populations...

...Naipaul's portrait of a nation coming apart before having a chance to take political or cultural shape is neither explosive or overtly dramatic...

...An official accepts the donation, then hurries to sell the national treasure to an art dealer in New York...

...Her father, an Indian schoolteacher converted to Christianity who anglicized the family name from Mahalingam to Mallingham, had raised her to become a member of the colonizer's world...

...Naipaul's subtly crafted account of abandonment and degeneration in a thinly-veiled version of Guyana focuses on two casualties of the new redemptive order, Dina and Aubrey St...

...black people going to rule the world...

...The novelist's fine-tuned irony finds especially fertile ground in Aubrey St...

...Aubrey accepts that his quixotic projects, laughed at by everyone except himself, will fail...

...In a graphic scene from her childhood, he literally beats the fear of a Christian God into her...

...The scene in a once beautiful park further confirms the general neglect that reigns alongside the rhetoric of Comrade President: "The loungers were out in force, perched like vultures on the sagging rails...

...Pierres inhabit a political and psychological void between the vanishing past and the balloting's foregone conclusion...

...Perhaps because Naipaul is dealing here with characters he created, though, the novel exhibits a tone of genuine sympathy for those condemned, through no fault of their own, to endure the whims of a brutal dictatorship modeled after the autocratic rule of black President Forbes Burnham...

...Nevertheless, he seems to be suggesting that racism in the developing world does not necessarily have its source in dealings between "imperialists" and newly independent peoples...

...Dina's personal void is bounded by a vague longing for deliverance from what she sees as Cuyama's dull inertia, and her recognition, albeit unexpressed, of the class and color definitions blocking an Indian in a land run by whites and Creoles...

...I suppose all we can do is await our fated dissolution," he says...

...Journey to Nowhere all too often drifted into facile contempt for the Guyanese, portrayed as fatuous or irremediably ignorant...