Word: naipaul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Paul Theroux’s memoir of his friendship with V.S. Naipaul, Naipaul hisses a typically vain slur at the Nobel Prize committee, after it has failed yet again to recognize the work of the objectively superior writer—V.S. Naipaul. “The Nobel committee are doing it again, as they do every year,” says Naipaul. “Pissing on literature. Pissing from a great height...
...Naipaul was no doubt delighted last month to discover the Nobel bladders temporarily empty, when the committee phoned him at his home in England to award him the million-dollar annual prize, “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” Speculation immediately brewed over whether the citation meant to acclaim the writer’s anti-Muslim travelogues, or his novels and stories, which have dealt with colonial subjects in times of indigence, pathos and humor. Naipaul’s most recent...
...Harvard Bookstore, Wordsworth and the Coop—have been hard-pressed to keep popular titles such as Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America by Yossef Bodansky and Taliban by Ahmed Rashid in stock. Other top sellers include Beyond Belief by 2001 Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul and Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong. English translations of the Qur’an have also been popular...
...nicer ironies of postcolonial English writing that the most evident heir to that great and fearsome archconservative Evelyn Waugh, who famously despised every civilization that had not been subjugated by Rome, should be from the Caribbean. Naipaul is also one of the very few writers to have a whole, book-length cruise missile of a memoir fired at him by a fellow writer. In 1998 Paul Theroux, in a striking fit of Oedipal peevishness, published Sir Vidia's Shadow, painting his former friend and mentor as a self-obsessed, avaricious, pathologically snobbish brute. Perhaps...
...last half of the 20th century brought a remarkable shift in the center of gravity of English writing. So much of the new, best stuff was coming from what once had been the periphery of Empire: from Africa, India, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Australia. Naipaul's work was a major part of this process, as was that of an earlier Nobelist, the Australian Patrick White. Naipaul wrote with piercing insight and even tenderness about ignored areas of experience (lower-middle-class Trinidadian life, for instance, in A House for Mr. Biswas, 1961). What was more, when he decided to leave...