V. S. Naipaul Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Joan Didion

Critical Essay by Joan Didion

It is hard not to note a certain turning in the air when V. S. Naipaul is mentioned, a hint of taint, a suggestion of favor about to go moot. He has become a question, as in "the question of Naipaul." One catches the construction "brilliant but": brilliant but obsessive, brilliant but reductive, brilliant but so dazzled by the glare off his particular circumstance—the Indian not an Indian, the Trinidadian not a Trinidadian, the Englishman never an Englishman—that he stays blind to the exigencies of history….

When writers are very celebrated they are of course more likely to elicit negative comment than when they are not, but the rush to categorize Naipaul is interesting, and seems to derive from more than just the predictable arc of a reputation….

[In The Return of Eva Perón] Naipaul dwells obdurately (obsessively, reductively) on a landscape that is presumed to comfort the forces of...
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