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November 25, 2008

MORNING WOOD

James Wood on the much-reviewed Naipaul biography, The World Is What It Is.

The Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy writes of the two voices in Kipling, which have been called the saxophone and the oboe. The first is the hard, militaristic, imperialist writer, and the second is the Kipling infused with Indianness, with admiration for the subcontinent’s cultures. Naipaul has a saxophone and an oboe, too, a hard sound and a softer one. These two sides could be called the Wounder and the Wounded. The Wounder is by now well known—the source of fascinated hatred in the literary world and postcolonial academic studies. He disdains the country he came from: “I was born there, yes. I thought it was a mistake.” When he won the Nobel Prize, in 2001, he said it was “a great tribute to both England, my home, and India, the home of my ancestors.” Asked why he had omitted Trinidad, he said that he feared it would “encumber the tribute.” He has written of the “barbarism” and “primitivism” of African societies, and has fixated, when writing about India, on public defecation. (“They defecate on the hills; they defecate on the riverbanks; they defecate on the streets.”) When asked for his favorite writers, he replies, “My father.” He is socially successful but deliberately friendless, an empire of one: “At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.”

Posted at 12:26 AM in Obsessions |

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Comments

Anne

Paul Theroux's book on his friendship with VS Naipul confirms James Wood's account.Theroux was certainly one of the wounded.

Posted by: Anne | November 26, 2008 at 01:58 PM

EC

I agree, Anne. In fact, that's the very thing I got on the Comments page for this post to mention, and there was your post! The first couple of paragraphs of Wood's review not only confirm, they echo; in fact except for the replacement of Wood for Theroux they could have come from a hundred points in the latter's wonderful memoir, which Wood doesn't mention. But the real point of those opening paragraphs is to communicate the really crucial information: That Wood had met Naipaul - and that Naipaul had evidently thought highly enough of the reviewer to grant him the encore!

I preferred Theroux's version.

Posted by: EC | November 28, 2008 at 04:42 PM

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TEV DEFINED


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