Word: naipaul
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...Tell the truth," V.S. Naipaul advised the young Paul Theroux in the mid-1960s, when the latter asked him how to get started as a novelist. As contradictory as that might seem - novelists make things up for a living, after all - anyone who has written fiction, or even tried to tell a convincing lie, knows exactly what Naipaul meant. The best tales have the air, feel and smell of authenticity about them, and the paradoxical aspect of good fiction is this honesty...
...From his very first book - 1957's The Mystic Masseur, about a deceitful guru - a dislike of fraudulence and "mimic men" has run through Naipaul's corpus, as it apparently does through his latest book, A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling. Naipaul's intention with this slim volume of essays is the continued unmasking of artifice and fabrication - not in a character or a society, but this time in writing. "There is a specificity to writing," Naipaul believes. "Certain settings, certain cultures, have to be written about in a certain way ... You cannot write about Nigerian tribal...
...That's hardly a profound point, whether you agree with it or not, but it does set the tone for what follows. Both the Naipaul fan and the general reader will turn the pages of A Writer's People with mounting dismay, not simply because it compares poorly with his previous work - the slow waning of which has been well documented - but because it indulges Naipaul's famous petulance to such an extent that the man himself fails at looking and feeling, whatever his book's subtitle might be. In place of truth-telling, he has substituted superciliousness and spite...
...Part memoir, part literary tutorial, the book begins with his recollections of Derek Walcott, a fellow Nobelist and West Indian writer whose first volume of poems was published in 1948. Naipaul came across it in 1955, while working part-time on a BBC radio program called Caribbean Voices. Although Naipaul says he broadcast everything Walcott submitted to the show, he also claims to have done so believing that "the first flush" of Walcott's inspiration had gone, and that the poet "was now marking time." Walcott's borrowing of Western European literary forms is peevishly dismissed as "falsifying...
...Naipaul is no kinder about other writers such as the English novelists Graham Greene and Anthony Powell, the Trinidadian novelist Sam Selvon, or the Bengali pundit and essayist Nirad Chaudhuri, all of whom were his contemporaries. Greene's The Quiet American is dismissed because it presumed a knowledge of Indo-Chinese politics and Naipaul imperiously claims to not be in the habit of reading the newspapers. Anthony Powell was a good friend - in fact, during the 1950s he helped the young and ambitious Naipaul secure work as a book reviewer for the British magazine the New Statesman, and displayed...