Patrick French
The biggest surprise in Patrick French's colourful biography of Sir Vidia Naipaul is that its biographee should have allowed it to be published. For it exposes him as an egotist, a domestic tyrant and a sadist to a degree that would be farcical if it were not for the consequent distress suffered over many years by his first wife, Pat.
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Picador; illustrated edition edition (31 Mar 2008)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0330433504
ISBN-13: 978-0330433501
In the Indian Economic Times, 10 May, 2008, Vikram Doctor leafs through V.S. Naipaul’s books looking for references to meals, concluding that Naipaul is no foodie–
ReplyDelete"V S Naipaul's essential attitude to food is shown in what is possibly the earliest piece of his writing to find its way into print.
Naipaul is describing an agonising Old Boy’s Association dinner: “He ignored this and the waiter bought me a plateful of green slime. This was the turtle soup. I was nauseated and annoyed and told the man to take it away. This, I was told, was a gross breach of etiquette.”
In that first page you have Naipaul’s vegetarianism, food that disgusts him, his feeling of being ignored and angered, his sense of offending people, and a lot of potatoes. Little, it seems, changes for him on the food front over the rest of his life."
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/The_Leisure_Lounge/Different_strokes_A_meal_worthy_of_Sir_Vidia/articleshow/3026707.cms
And: “It’s going to be nasty,” Derek Walcott said, prefacing his war on V. S. Naipaul with a warning. “The Mongoose” was the last of Walcott’s new poems at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica on May 24, 2088. He’d wondered whether he ought to read it, Walcott said, “and then I figured if I don’t do it, I’ll say: what the hell, you should have done it… I think you’ll recognize Mr. Naipaul.”
ReplyDeleteThe Mongoose
I have been bitten. I must avoid infection,
Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.
Read his last novels. You’ll see just what I mean:
A lethargy approaching the obscene.
The model is Maugham, more ho-hum than Dickens.
The essays have more bite. They scatter chickens,
Like critics. But each studied phrase is poison,
Since he has made that sneering style a prison.
Their plots are forced, the prose sedate and silly.
The anti-hero is a prick named Willy,
Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence
And whines with his creator’s self-abhorrence…
Can never get enough Naipaul love..
ReplyDelete