Antilles: the weblog of the CRB

Links, links, links

- Another review of the new Naipaul--this time, by Chandrahas Choudhury in the UK Observer:

Naipaul's operative idea through the book is not so much prose style as what he calls 'vision'. For him, how well a writer 'sees' is what makes his work forceful, ageless, truthful. Those who see clearly bring to their work some original perception of the world, do not merely imitate established forms, treasure precision, avoid rhetoric. Bad writers are verbose and tend to over-explain; even worse, they are often intellectually dishonest.

- Also in the Observer, fifty "celebrated" writers each name a much-loved and underrated book that deserves to be better known (part one, part two). Ali Smith's choice? No Pain Like This Body, by the Trinidadian writer Harold Sonny Ladoo:

Ladoo writes with the power of Faulkner, but stripped of all dandification. A fable about the death of innocence and the workings of poverty, it's as rich as fiction can be.

- In the Jamaica Gleaner arts section, poet Ishion Hutchinson remembers his sixth form English literature teacher, Maxwell Coore. "We bonded over Shakespeare...."

- Also in the Gleaner, Anthea McGibbon reports on the work of the four artists in the Super Plus Under-40 Artist of the Year competition: Paula Daley, Cleve Bowen, Oya Tyehimba Kujichaguila, and Kereine Chang-Fatt.

- The Stabroek News carries a second instalment of the Guyana Prize for Literature judges' report. (Part one appeared in last Sunday's Stabroek.)

- And in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Carlin Romano reviews Junot Díaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and finds that "despite too many badly written passages and a hodgepodge of repetitive riffs on teenage sexuality, Caribbean exoticism, and 'character is fate' ... if you stick with it to the end, it touches you."