bunudhungana

This is a lousy boring book. Naipaul seems very interested in telling us How The World Works, or at least how it works in Africa (he does know Africa is a continent and not a country, right?) The problem, though, is that this is ostensibly a novel and not a work of non-fiction, and Naipaul isn't a very good storyteller. He mostly narrates rather than dramatizes. There are long, long passages where there is no dialogue, which would be all right if something interesting actually happened in those passages. I always thought it was a shame that Kurt Vonnegut never won the Nobel Prize for Literature. After having read Jelinek's The Piano Teacher and now this book, I think that actually speaks well for Vonnegut. Oh, and great idea using a river as your central symbol. I don't think that's ever been done before.

2020-08-31 09:55