My instincts have been confirmed.

Warning: this is a literature rant that many of the people reading this blog have hear incessantly. I'm not known for keeping my opinions to myself.


I have always had very mixed feeling towards V. S. Naipaul. He and Rushdie are often taken as exemplifiers of two very different approaches to post-colonial writing and I tend to ideologically agree with Rushdie, though I have few illusions that he, or his writing, are perfect in any way. Having said this, I love Naipaul's non-fiction and I really wanted to like him when I started reading* his fiction, but it has always left me cold.

Now, while I will openly admit that I should read more of him before damning him, (this is true of most of the authors I am about to name) He quickly fell into a group of authors that I class in my head as, well, whiny men who may be good stylists, but whose books bore me and make me dislike them. This list includes Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo(White Noise may be my least favorite book of all time, though this may have to do with the fact that I have been forced to read it three times), and Philip Roth (it also kind of includes James Joyce; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man induces murderous feelings in me). I will not say that at some point I will not revisit any of these authors and change my mind, but I also don't have a great desire to and I have felt very guilty about this in Naipaul's case.

I do not feel guilty any more after reading reviews of the biography about him that has just been released. Also, I no longer feel near as much of a need to explain away his hatred of Rushdie; apparently he hates everyone, or at least every other author. Having said this, I should probably read both the biography and some more favorable coverage of him before I go around spouting this sort of thing. He did write a fascinating book on the South, which I have often called home.



*I was on a Nobel Prize winner kick for a while when I was out of school; this is why I am a graduate student. I designed a course for myself and audited at the closest school when I wasn't actually in school.

PS: Please excuse the grammatical errors that this post was full of when it first went up. I was a bit worked up.