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Naipaul’s Book of the World Hilary Mantel

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Naipaul’s Book of the World Hilary Mantel October 24, 2002 issue Reviewed: The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul, edited and with an introduction by Pankaj Mishra Knopf, 524 pp., $30.00 V. S. Naipaul; drawing by David Levine Buy Print There are places on earth where, at certain moments in the cycle of day and night, the two are indistinguishable. It is impossible to know, without other referents, whether you are looking at dawn or dusk. And there are places at the margins of cities, or at the edges of the man-made sprawl of holiday islands, where at twilight growth and decay are indistinguishable; you can’t tell, at first glance, whether you are looking at a building site or a ruin. Is that earth-colored brick waiting for its glassy marble cladding, or is it crumbling back into the condition of soil? And that distant rumble, of traffic or marching feet: Have the entrepreneurs arrived, or is it the barbarians? Is it possible that they are the same? Instances of crepuscular insight, c...
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Jorge Luis Borges, The Art of Fiction No. 39

  The Paris Review Subscribe Jorge Luis Borges , The Art of Fiction No. 39 Interviewed by Ronald Christ Issue 40, Winter-Spring 1967 This interview was conducted in July 1966, in conversations I held with Borges at his office in the Biblioteca Nacional, of which he is the director. The room, recalling an older Buenos Aires, is not really an office at all but a large, ornate, high-ceilinged chamber in the newly renovated library. On the walls—but far too high to be easily read, as if hung with diffidence—are various academic certificates and literary citations. There are also several Piranesi etchings, bringing to mind the nightmarish Piranesi ruin in Borges’s story, “The Immortal.” Over the fireplace is a large portrait; when I asked Borges’s secretary, Miss Susana Quinteros, about the portrait, she responded in a fitting, if unintentional echo of a basic Borgesean theme: “No importa. It’s a reproduction of another painting.”    At diagonally opposite corners of the room ...
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