by EMILY WITT
Pick up the collected essays of any member of what we might imagine as a dream team of postcolonial literature and it will include an annoyed complaint about V. S. Naipaul. Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott—each has publicly registered his disgust with the Nobel Prize winner from Trinidad. Mr. Naipaul’s novels are one source of dismay, but what enrages everyone is his travel writing. At issue is Mr. Naipaul’s callous treatment of respective homelands or religions, his use of minor samples to draw broad and negative conclusions, his unfairness, prejudice and blind pessimism. But also, really, it’s that even though his work is exasperating, ill-informed and usually kind of offensive, people still think he’s great.
Consider the bulk of Mr. Naipaul’s travel oeuvre. It’s pretty repetitive. He goes to some non-European place—India, Congo and Iran are some previous destinations—and, in a style that Mr. Rushdie called “a novelist’s truth masquerading as objective reality,” Mr. Naipaul complains. He complains about the natives’ disrespect for hygiene, regular garbage collection and the tenets of the Enlightenment. He subjects his readers to the country’s abhorrent lack of concern for his own personal comfort, dietary preferences and taste in architecture.
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