MEGA VS NAIPAUL PING!!!!
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Today's photo humor>
Thu Aug 8, 6:44 AM ET
A group of Ba'th party soldiers, who appear to have explosives tied to their waists, gather for a military parade in Baghdad in support of President Saddam Hussein August 8, 2002. Iraq's President Saddam Hussein said on Thursday that he was not frightened by threats from the United States and his country was ready to repel any attack. Photo by Faleh Kheiber/Reuters
Saddam sure says that frequently...makes you wonder who he's trying to convince? After all we whupped his sorry butt once already after he said the same thing, so it's not us....
</rhetorical question>
 "Does this semtex make me look fat?" |
About the most serious of Saddam's photo opts was the time when he had Iraquis dressed up as Babylonians, marching along into the rebuilding of Babylon and one of them had this great big pair of Nikis on instead of sandals.
http://www.tehelka.com/channels/literary/2001/aug/13/lr081301naipaul1.htm
"Indian writers don't know why their country is
in such a mess"
In this controversial interview, first published in the Literary Review, V S Naipaul speaks to Farrukh Dhondy about Half A Life, his first novel in 22 years, and lashes out against other established writers, some of them his contemporaries: Forster: "…someone who didn't know Indian people", Narayan: "…his India is a ruin", Soyinka: "…a marvelously Establishment figure actually" and Joyce: "…he is not interested in the world." While
indulging in his characteristic plain-speak, Naipaul manages to remain consistently insightful about the big issues: religion, history, society and the writerly life, without ever losing sight of the individual struggles for existence that constitute the heart of the human condition. In doing so, he shows how a writer's worldview, achieved after a painful journey of self-discovery and self-knowledge, can hold important lessons for humanity.
Also read: Lit Chillum - A Notebook for Mr Biswas: Amitava Kumar celebrates Sir Vidia's 69th birthdayI drive to Wiltshire on a rare sunny English summer's day to interview V S Naipaul in his country home. All his books, fiction and non-fiction, are to be reissued (by Picador in Britain and Knopf in the USA), and this interview anticipates the publication next month of his new novel, Half a Life. Before we begin our conversation, Vidia shows me round his garden, which stretches for an acre down a slope to the water meadows of the River Avon. It contains myriad shades of green, the deep purple of copper beech, several varieties of holly, some white blossoms, but no flowerbeds. Vidia tells me the names of the trees and the prospects for their growth, saying two or three times what a copse or hedge will look like in years to come, 'when I shall be gone'.
You said not long ago that the novel doesn't interest you any more, that 'the novel is finished'. But you've written one now. Was that declaration just a tease?
No. The novel is so bastardised a form, and it's so passing. Everyone writes a novel, and it's so much a copy, unconsciously, unwittingly, of novels that have gone before. The really true books are the ones that last - not the copies. I was saying that I preferred reading the originals.
This latest novel finds a new way of telling a story. Why is it called Half a Life?
It's a lovely title.
It does fit.
Yes, it does fit.
But you don't want to give the game away?
You must allow me to keep a few secrets.
All right. It's not set out in dramatic scenes. I was reminded of your non-fiction, of India: A Million Mutinies Now and of Beyond Belief, where you recreate the stories real people tell you.
Plain narrative, yes.
It's different from your other fiction. If one adapted A House for Mr Biswas for the screen for instance, the dialogue is all virtually there. To adapt Half a Life would be different.
I've always tried not to write the same book. Every book is new. It does different things. The material was knocking around in my head for a quarter of a century. I don't keep a journal, but sometimes when I'm moved by certain things I just make very brief notes in a particular notebook. So there have been notes about this for a long time. But I didn't find any way of putting it together. I got taken up with these major books you mentioned. They were very taxing. But I had this material, and my publishers and my agent required me to do a work of imagination. I was required to do it.
Well, it's a very powerful work of the imagination. It takes us through three different settings, and three different eras, and we meet people in different ways. We follow its central character, Willy, from pre-independence India, to postwar London, to a Portuguese province in Africa.
I tried to make it easy, and light, and a small book, and yet full of things.
The theme is that of man in our times looking for a life and perhaps having to borrow a life. Never living life to the full?
Don't you think most people or many of the people we know are like that?
Possibly, but I hadn't thought of it in those terms before. I didn't estimate the percentage of life people had acquired for themselves. But it's a telling way of estimation.
I think most people think about it, and you feel less critical of yourself for not achieving a full life. You will understand that many people are living only fractions of lives.
There is a sense of sadness throughout in the failures of Willy, of his family. And what comes out strongly is sexual failure: his own experience, his conviction that his parents never achieved proper sexual experience.
You know we are not responsible for what comes out in a book. We are not fully in control of it. What comes over is probably quite different from what we intend. I spent much more time working out the narrative very slowly, almost picture by picture. Now that you've said that about the sex, I suppose it is true. I think it probably reflects something in my own life, a lack of sexual fulfilment until quite late. And then although sex may be very prominent in this, as you've discovered, there is no absurd description of sex at all.
Nothing that would qualify for the 'Bad Sex Prize'.
(Laughs) Nothing like that.
You've used four-letter words a few times, which you've not done in previous books.
I tried to leave them out and it looked absurd, so I went back and spelt the word out. I made them say it as they would say it. On the sexual theme, I think everybody's sexuality is very important. Seduction is important, and the grossness of pornographic writing annihilates the importance of it. It suggests that you just have to deal with it in this gross way, and you've handled the matter. But it's too profound to be dealt with in that way. In a way the physical description of sex, which is what people go to the books for sometimes, is very far from the difficulties of fulfilment.
My concern in the book is also the historical side of things. Willy runs away from his background, and even when he gets to Africa, this Portuguese province, he is reminded of the background from which he came.
We will return to the new book later. Can we go back to when you started to write? You have written about waiting for an agonising time before you knew what it was you had to write. You describe the first sentence that came to you when you were working in the Langham Hotel building of the BBC. It's from Miguel Street. And yet that wasn't your first published book. Could you clarify the chronology?
It's actually an important question: it's part of the pain I suffered when I was beginning. I wrote Miguel Street first, and it was taken by Andrew Salkey, a friend, to André Deutsch. Diana Athill, the editor at Deutsch, liked it, but André Deutsch, who knew about these things, said 'short stories don't sell'. And they kept the book for a long time. I had little moments of terror, panic. They wanted a novel first, so I wrote The Mystic Masseur. I finished it in January 1956. It should have been published that year. To a destitute man it mattered to be published. Of course you can't wait six months and then six months again. But The Mystic Masseur wasn't published until May 1957, and then another novel, and finally, in 1959, they published Miguel Street. The stories, which had been written in 1955, have never been out of print; they've made a fortune for André Deutsch. But look at the trouble they gave me. The publishers could have eased my path a little, but they didn't. It was the trouble I had with André Deutsch. He believed that only one person's interest had to be served. But it must be said that at that time, in 1955 or thereabouts, it would have been hard for my material to be considered a real book by any London publisher. André Deutsch took it up and I think it was because of Diana Athill. She was a remarkable editor, she always softened the awfulness of the man Deutsch.
You say softened - and you often use the word 'hard' in your autobiographical pieces. You use the same word about your father and his life and ambition. What does the word mean?
A very simple thing. Shall we say for my father it means - heaven knows where the spark came from, in that plantation colony of Trinidad - getting the wish to be a writer and not having anyone interested. To this day they're not interested. I would say that my father's grandchildren are not interested in his work. It's bitter, isn't it?
Why was it so?
Well, my wife's daughter has recently been looking at some of my father's writing. She's from Pakistan. She's enchanted by the writing, because the people he was writing about are closer to the subcontinent. That's one reason. And the other reason is that we come from a peasant culture. It's not a literary culture. There's no tradition of reading. There's sacred reading, there's reading of the epics, there's reading of the scriptures on religious occasions. And there is an oddity, then, in his ambition, that he should want to write when in his culture there is no tradition of reading or writing.
That becomes a theme in Mystic Masseur doesn't it? The main character wants to write and doesn't know what on earth to write about. So he reads all these books, orders them by mail.
You know the Masseur is slightly autobiographical, symbolically, because the wish to be a writer represented my own wish. The hardness for me was actually learning how to write.
But the Masseur doesn't. His first book is a hundred questions and answers about Hinduism.
Yes. That's his book. And the author of the book is wishing that it could be so easy for him too. Actually I had an uncle who wrote a book like that.
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