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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