VS Naipaul
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What does /lit/ think of Naipaul? I don't see him mentioned too often here. I finished A Bend in the River and as a history fag it was a fascinating read. What are his other novels like? What do you think of him?
>>7748672
He is my favorite writer. I made a thread a few weeks back, where a few words were shared, but can't find any archival for /lit/. This was the thread if you can find any backup: boards.4chan.org/lit/thread/7686393/naipaul-discussion-thread
The obvious tropes came up: why liberals hate him so much, shitty comparisons with Rushdie (who is a hack in comparison), basically vacuous criticism from people who haven't read him.
I think the bottom line is that Naipaul is the greatest living prose writer of the English language, a master of sentence construction. A writer's writer, as he's called. Frank to a fault, he doesn't find many fans. He has also been prophetic in what he's written, many of the things he wrote in 70s and 80s are all the more relevant today, if you want to understand ISIS and other fundamentalists do what they do. He is also unsympathetic and doesn't allow anyone to follow into the victim mentality, the primary reason people hate him so much. When he wrote "Among the Believers" and "Beyond Belief" he talked about how Islam only allows the Arab people to have a history, to have places of worship- how the converted cultures cope with this reality. Why the Ayatollah of Shia non-Arab Iran wears a black turban as a symbol of obeisance to the Qureish. He spots undercurrents and details in people's conversation that are unnerving, and after reading his book you wouldn't want to have a chat with that guy. He will write about you and expose your deepest fears and dilemmas.
Orhan Pamuk began his memoir thus: Conrad,Nabokov, Naipaul - these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness.
And this kind of sums up the tragedy of Naipaul, more so than the others he's been clubbed with. He belongs to an unmarked continent of literature which knows no loyalty, no affinities. He doesn't pull any punches, doesn't patronize, is irreverant as fuck. Whether he writes about Trinidad, India, UK, America or Africa, his tone is the same. One who dives under the skin with clinical precision and lays the wounds open for all to see. In this era of political correctness, we don't like these things shown unsanitized. And that is the tragedy of this immensely talented writer. The only one who close imo was Coetzee, who has a very different style.
>>7749437
You don't know what the word "trope" means.
>>7750742
Trope is what you use to climb down t'pit, isn't it?
talented writer but
"what is seen as crucially informative and telling about their work - their accounts of the Indian darkness or the Arab predicament - is precisely what is weakest about it: with reference to the actualities it is ignorant, illiterate, and cliché-ridden. Naipaul's account of the Islamic, Latin American, African, Indian and Caribbean worlds totally ignores a massive infusion of critical scholarship about those regions in favor of the tritest, cheapest and the easiest of colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies, myths that even Lord Cromer and Forster's Turtons and Burtons would have been embarrassed to trade in outside their private clubs"
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40547786?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
>>7749437
Naipaul is a great writer, but you sound like a faggot.
>>7750991
>call him a faggot, that'll sure show him
why do you bother posting
