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Finding the Center : Two Narratives

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In the first of the two essays, and more important of this book V. S. Naipaul tells of his literary beginnings. He describes how he wrote the first sentence which truly got him going. He was at the time a twenty- three year part - time reporter for the BBC covering his native Caribbean. "It was in that Victorian- Edwardian gloom, and at one of those typewriters that later one afternoon, without having any idea where I was going, and not perhaps intending to type to the end of the page. I wrote ' Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across , "What happening there, Bogart?'
Thus began one of the most distinguished of living novelists' literary career. Subsequently in the memoir Naipaul tells us how his father, a sometime journalist and troubled figure transmitted the urge to writing, and the sense of cultures and worlds mixed and lost in the background- the pursuit of which and definition of which would be a major element in Naipaul's literary work.
Naipaul writes with a sharpness of eye, a clear and deep sense of human character complexities, and of the vast variety of human situations and realities.
Even in these small essays his great gifts are abundantly apparent.