Bizarre Political Lives
Naipaul, V.S.
Bizarre Political Lives THE RETURN OF EVA PERON by V.S. Naipaul (Alfred A. Knopf. 228 pp. $10). Few writers show the Third World to the West with the imaginative power of V.S. Naipaul, who was...
...Widely praised as a novelist (Guerrillas, A Bend in the River), Naipaul as a journalist approaches reality with the freedom of fiction...
...Then quick, firm, he sets them down, cracks them open: and we imagine that we understand the bizarre heroes of Trinidad, Argentina, the Congo—colonial places where the introduction of Western political rhetoric, revolutionary political rhetoric, has had ludicrous, terrible consequences...
...In the accounts collected here as The Return of Eva Peron, he turns political lives in his hands, examines them closely, intently, holds them up to the light—bemused, obsessed by the surface, the colors, the dark spots...
...Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad of Indian heritage but has lived in London most of his life...
Vol. 45 • October 1981 • No. 10
