journal6

Naipaul’s book the Enigma of Arrival has such a hypnotizing effect that I was lulled to sleep several times in the week when I wrestled with it. Therefore, I made up my mind to reread it when I suffer from insomnia sometime. It is true that his English is elegant and smooth but his content has been diluted in too many pages while there is a lack of an interesting plot. It occurs to me that Charles Dickens wrote for a lucrative purpose and that is why he devoted a lot of space in his novels to some sentimentalisms and verbosities. Charles Dickens was capable of prolixity but he didn’t overact to such an extent as to offend the readers. On the contrary, Naipaul preferred to indulge in his writing to relieve his anxiety of the identity crisis while ignoring the fact that most of the readers read for fun not to share his piled-up emotions. The only justification I can give for his indifference to his readers is that he had earned much money and fame and now it was time that he mixed much of himself with a large volume of details to torture the readers’ nerves. Anyway, I do not sympathize with him about his disillusion of the British Dream. He, self-assuming, laughed at the world and ultimately the world laughed at him.

I notice that he is an Indian subject to the British colonial education and as a result, he cherished the British ideals and shared the values predominant in the British colonial system. I just feel it strange how his mind was poisoned to such a degree that he identified with the British whites. Didn’t he realize that he was different from the British whites and just played a marginalized role in the colonial system? After reading Isaacs’ Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India, I learn that one of the reasons why the Indians are despised is that the Indians, though denounced as an inferior breed, are inclined to take it