It has become the fashion to knock VS Naipaul. Yes, he is a fine prose stylist, and has written some good books (so the wisdom goes), but his recent novels have been shapeless and repetitive and his writing abilities have been eclipsed by his general grumpiness and his reactionary views on such matters as race and multiculturalism.
This account, while reasonable in many ways, leaves out what it is that made Naipaul such a good and original writer in the first place. In his elegant review of Naipaul’s new essay collection in the latest issue of Prospect, Ian Jack reminds us. Naipaul arrived in Britain in the 1950s to find a society which, although attractive in some respects, was of little use to him as a writer. European society had, as Jack puts it, been “crawled over” by the great British, French and Russian novelists. And so Naipaul had to find “a new way of writing, entirely his own, because he could find no models that fitted his experience.” Do Prospect readers agree with Jack’s assessment? Leave your comments here.
Self-absorption makes V S Naipaul caricature of himself.
V S Naipaul willy-nilly became poster boy of Hindu fanatics during previous federal administration in India.
When I read V S Naipaul’s “India: A Wounded Civilization” (first published 1977), it was one of my most profound experiences. The book still has not left me.
Commenting on Mahatma Gandhi’s description of his passage to England from “The Story of My Experiments with Truth”, Naipaul said (“A Defect of Vision”):
“…That is the voyage: an internal adventure of anxieties felt and food eaten, with not a word of anything seen or heard that did not directly affect the physical or mental well-being of the writer. The inward concentration is fierce, the self-absorption complete…. Though Gandhi spent three years in England, there is nothing in his autobiography about the climate or the seasons, so unlike heat and monsoon of Gujarat and Bombay…No London building is described, no street, no room, no crowd, no public conveyance…”
Reading this was like touching a hot pan, waking up from a deep slumber.
In the Nobel lecture on Dec 7, 2001, Naipaul said:”…I am near the end of my work now. I am glad to have done what I have done, glad creatively to have pushed myself as far as I could go. Because of the intuitive way in which I have written, and also because of the baffling nature of my material, every book has come as a blessing. Every book has amazed me; up to the moment of writing I never knew it was there. But the greatest miracle for me was getting started. I feel - and the anxiety is still vivid to me - that I might easily have failed before I began.”
Well, he has failed with his ‘new’, 29th book “A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling”.
First of all there is nothing new in this book. Second he makes sweeping statements without backing them up.
Naipaul’s biggest problem, like most Western analysts of India, is he does not read any Indian language. That is a big handicap because best of India has always been expressed in its native languages. And tragically, it is not always translated in English.
Naipaul lambasts Vinoba Bhave. I wish he read Marathi to understand Vinoba Bhave’s Marathi books and realize why, along with poet-saints, Vinoba is Marathi’s rare ‘best-seller’.
Naipaul says “(In India) literary criticism is still hardly known as an art”. This is far from the truth. He should care to read Dilip Chitre’s book on Tukaram (”Punha Tukaram” which also is available in English) or Durga Bhagwat’s commentary on Mahabharata (”Vyas Parva”) or M V Dhond’s criticism of B S Mardhekar’s poetry (”Tarihi Yeto Vas Phulana”) etc.
Naipaul says ‘Indian writers to speak generally seem to know only about their own families and their places of work”. This may be true of R K Narayan or Vikram Seth but not of Bhau Padhye- the original chronicler of Bombay (ahead of Vikram Chandra) in all its colours.
Naipaul like most Indians does not know when to shut up, when to retire. Man has become caricature of himself.
When I read V S Naipaul’s “India: A Wounded Civilization” (first published 1977), it was one of my most profound experiences. The book still has not left me.
Commenting on Mahatma Gandhi’s description of his passage to England from “The Story of My Experiments with Truth”, Naipaul said (“A Defect of Vision”):
“…That is the voyage: an internal adventure of anxieties felt and food eaten, with not a word of anything seen or heard that did not directly affect the physical or mental well-being of the writer. The inward concentration is fierce, the self-absorption complete…. Though Gandhi spent three years in England, there is nothing in his autobiography about the climate or the seasons, so unlike heat and monsoon of Gujarat and Bombay…No London building is described, no street, no room, no crowd, no public conveyance…”
Reading this was like touching a hot pan, waking up from a deep slumber.
In the Nobel lecture on Dec 7, 2001, Naipaul said:”…I am near the end of my work now. I am glad to have done what I have done, glad creatively to have pushed myself as far as I could go. Because of the intuitive way in which I have written, and also because of the baffling nature of my material, every book has come as a blessing. Every book has amazed me; up to the moment of writing I never knew it was there. But the greatest miracle for me was getting started. I feel - and the anxiety is still vivid to me - that I might easily have failed before I began.”
Well, he has failed with his ‘new’, 29th book “A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling”.
First of all there is nothing new in this book. Second he makes sweeping statements without backing them up.
Naipaul’s biggest problem, like most Western analysts of India, is he does not read any Indian language. That is a big handicap because best of India has always been expressed in its native languages. And tragically, it is not always translated in English.
Naipaul has lambasted Vinoba Bhave. I wish he read Marathi, a language in which Bhave wrote his books,to realize why, along with poet-saints, Vinoba is Marathi’s rare ‘best-seller’.
Naipaul says “(In India) literary criticism is still hardly known as an art”. This is far from the truth. He should care to read Dilip Chitre’s book on Tukaram (”Punha Tukaram” which also is available in English) or Durga Bhagwat’s commentary on Mahabharata (”Vyas Parva”) or M V Dhond’s criticism of B S Mardhekar’s poetry (”Tarihi Yeto Vas Phulana”) etc.
Naipaul says ‘Indian writers to speak generally seem to know only about their own families and their places of work”. This may be true of R K Narayan or Vikram Seth but not of Bhau Padhye- the original chronicler of Bombay (ahead of Vikram Chandra) in all its colours.
Naipaul like most Indians does not know when to shut up, when to retire. Man has become caricature of himself.
We must not forget that Naipaul is Hindu writerhis.Upbring was in Hindu family in old traditional way, what may be he claimed in his younger age, harshly critised the Hindu civilazation,when he enter in his fifty naturaly he turned to Vanarapratha, great tradition of classical Hindu way of life, why he supported to destroying Babari Mashjid, and his writing turning to world as a maya and Moksha is ultimate aim.
He wrote one artical in one magazine and himself confessed that in the age of fifty five he think himselfas as a retired person and amazed that western couple are enjoying life at the age of ninety and planning for tour in this age also.
That is why his recent writing is so colourless and dull. that one is tragedy of Hindu writer` in old age
I haven’t read Naipaul’s account of Powell, though waiting for a friend to die before attacking
his work seems a typical act of the vindictive and self-justifying shit Paul Theroux describes, although I love the early novels and parts of “The Enigma of Arrival”.
But if Ian Jack wants to make assertions about “A Dance to the Music of Time” perhaps he ought to read it?
Naipaul’s early works of fiction were excellent glimpses at life in his native land. Characters were real, insights were pithy. Since he, rightly, achieved a place among the better writers of his time, he took to navel gazing. This introspection comes off as a series of lecture to his inferiors and has left him less readable; certainly less enjoyable.
Spot on, Peter Culley.
I have read Ian Jack for years with the greatest pleasure, but I’m afraid that this essay reeks of class bias, despite IJ’s wholly unconvincing attempt to head off any such charge in two rather contradictory consecutive sentences:
“but the series that was said to be his masterpiece seemed to depend for its effect on the reader already knowing the kind of people the author was writing about. Today Powell and his characters would be called “toffs,” but I don’t think it was the social difference between the reader and the read-about that stood as a barrier to the books’ pleasure. Evelyn Waugh wrote from and about the same territory and made it sharp, funny . . .”
IJ probably minds Waugh writing about the upper classes far less than Powell doing so because Waugh’s satire was far harsher. Powell’s was gentle and wonderfully affectionate, which IJ chooses to interpret as:
“Powell, by contrast, looked to be engaged in a long-winded private satire, with footmen posted at the door to keep the wrong sort of reader out.”
Yes, there is indeed an intense intimacy about the Dance series, and that’s of the essence of its delights. But far from feeling shut out, I have always felt happily included in reading and re-reading it. Absolutely no footmen getting in my way. Isn’t that the joy of literature? You open a book and — with an imagination — can enter almost any world you please.
I’d like to add that the people I’ve met and known from the working class west of Scotland about whom IJ writes so amusingly and lovingly have sharpened my appreciation of his essays.
Why perpetuate class hatred by filtering even literary criticism through tedious prejudices? I don’t disagree that it’s a mark of VS Naipaul’s brilliance that he knew he had to find his own style — and did. But that doesn’t make him a perceptive, discerning or remotely reliable critic of Powell. VS could well have the literary equivalent of a tin ear for quintessentially English themes and styles — his loathing and incomprehension of Jane Austen are well known.
I own practically all VS’s books, but his attack on his old friend is renewed proof of his nearly pathological lack of control over the green-eyed monster — so thanks, IJ, but I won’t be buying this new collection of his essays.
I’m most interested in what Ian Jack has to say about Naipaul’s search for clarity, because it sounds to me like one of those useful catch-alls a writer might use to justify his own way of writing and dismiss others. I haven’t read the essays yet, though I am reading, and enjoying, some of Naipaul’s other essays at the moment. No one, however, could call him an impartial writer, which is part of the pleasure to be found in his work - the dinner-party raconteur Jack describes - but also one of his weaknesses, when he lets his partiality run away with him (the same raconteur after one too many, perhaps).
So, what is clarity? Poetry, apparently, is unclear. That’s a sweeping generalization if I ever heard one. What kind of poetry? Why more obscure than certain kinds of prose? And Graham Greene’s The Quiet American is unclear because Naipaul, never having been to Vietnam, didn’t understand it, or didn’t receive a clear enough picture of the place to satisfy him. But that’s assuming Greene’s intention was to write a travelogue, when Vietnam in The Quiet American is an unsettled world that’s mysterious to most of the people moving through it. No one there understands each other, and we’re seeing that world through the eyes of its most estranged characters, people who are foreign even to themselves. As a lover of Greeneland I must admit I’m not inclined to be sympathetic to those who don’t appreciate him. As a reader, though, I can enjoy many disparate kinds of writing - I love, for example, books that leave me feeling strange throughout (Greene can do that), and I love “clear” writers (Dickens, Mavis Gallant). I don’t read to have the world fully explained to me, more to be woken up by the unexpected, and provoked to think, and read, more attentively. That’s my two cents.