Finding the Center

In the essay, ""Prologue to an Autobiography,'' Naipaul recounts his beginnings as a writer and renders a touching portrait of his father. In ``The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,'' a study of the Ivory Coast, he delineates two sections of the modern African mind: the Westernized ``day'' mind and that of the ageless, magic-haunted ``night.'' PW called both narratives ``small works of art.'' January