NOT an F.O.J: V.S. Naipaul
March 29, 2006
Mags, brace yourself. We have Dorothy on standby with a huge pot of Orange Pekoe.
In an article on the Beeb, V.S. Naipaul rants about authors from Ernest Hemingway to Jane Austen:
The author slates Dickens for his “repetitiveness” and cites the experience of reading Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey as a revelatory one.
“I thought halfway through the book, ‘Here am I, a grown man reading about this terrible vapid woman and her so-called love life.’
“I said to myself, ‘What am I doing with this material? This is for somebody else, really.”
Look at it this way, Mags: at least he didn’t say anything about Da Man!
(Thanks to Alert Janeite Sophia J for sending this in!)
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“Have you ever read Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?”
“Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.”
Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question, but he prevented her by saying, “Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t’other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation.”
As Jane Austen knew, sometimes the snark just writes itself.
LOL, Mags!!
Who is he calling the “vapid woman” though? Catherine or JA? B/c I don’t want to have to snark again about JA’s “love life.”
I think Catherine. Poor dear. At least Henry loves her. (And so do I.)
Didn’t Naipul rant on for pages and pages in the NYTBR last year about how fiction was dead and non-fiction reigneth over the hearts and minds of men in this strife-ridden age? I think he’s going crackers, poor thing.
Now WHO is this person that thinks he’s great enough to attack most of the great classic authors? (though I agree about Hemingway).
He’s a great writer himself, mostly about his life in India (?), but he’s a little around the bend. Plus there’s no accounting for taste. We know Twain, Charlotte Bronte and other luminary writers didn’t like her. Their loss.
Naipul wrote “The Bend in the River” I think, so that’s why I must have thought he’s around the bend. Funny, I never use that idiom. Oh well, this is very interesting…..but only to me, alas. ‘Nite.
The man is clearly insane- he cannot read James Joyce?
*laughs hysterically and then cries over her class readings of Finnegan’s Wake*
But thank you, this article really did make me laugh- especially the bit about Hemingway being too busy with being American!