2001 Nobel V.S. Naipaul
Terrance
lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Thu Oct 11 09:03:58 CDT 2001
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1998/09/cov_16feature.html
The Naipaul that emerges here is so
compellingly monstrous, and Theroux's
narrative style is so persuasively deadpan,
that it is easy to overlook the strong
element of caricature in the portrait.
Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent, is
not the crude racist or snob that a literal
recounting of his comments seems to
confirm. Even a small amount of context
about the man and his work reveals that
when, for instance, he speaks sneeringly of
"common people," he is referring to a state
of mind -- a chosen way of being -- rather
than a social stratification. Likewise, his
insistence on calling Africans
"bow-and-arrow men" -- offensive though
it may be -- is a conscious provocation, a
response to a particular kind of knee-jerk
liberalism that his own experiences as an
ambitious colonial boy have taught him to
despise. Theroux gets a lot of mileage from
Naipaul's harsh assessments of the African
students' literary efforts, but never once
does he examine the possibility that
Naipaul is acting not out of aimless sadism
but rather a refusal to patronize.
KXX4493553 at aol.com wrote:
>
> In einer eMail vom 11.10.01 15:29:32 (MEZ) - Mitteleurop. Sommerzeit schreibt
> davidmmonroe at yahoo.com:
>
> > A stylistically if not necessarily politically
> > conservative choice, Naipaul (who, however, I know
> > only from A Bend in the River), perhaps?
> Oh yes, a "realist", rather conventional, sometimes racist (see how he
> describes Black Africans), but a very good storyteller.... whites are often
> pathologic and decadent, especially gays (see the description of the British
> development aid worker in "Minic Men")... in "Guerillas" Malcolm X (a
> Caribbean Malcolm X in this case, to be correct) is described as a nihilistic
> leader, a pederast and mentally completely disturbed...
>
> Kurt-Werner Pörtner
>
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