Charlie Rose Science Series
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11/13/2001
V.S. Naipaul
A conversation with Indian author V.S. Naipaul
Keywords:
A discussion with Nobel laureate for literature V.S. Naipaul about his writing and his book "Half a Life", which follows the story of an Indian man trying to find himself in London.
DVD
Charlie Rose DVDs on Amazon.
Charlie Rose DVDs on Amazon.
Audio
Audio available through Audible.com.
Audio available through Audible.com.
Transcripts
Transcripts available through Voxant.
Transcripts available through Voxant.
Naipauls book on islam are excellent. In more than one way it predicted the rising power of fundamentalist who allways have been a force in islam. The Iranian part revealed the craziness towards which country had come to.
Naipaul is simply the greatest living writer. I hope he comes on Rose again. The man is brilliant.
Naipaul's books on Islam are hideous, common, pseudo-intellectual, and only appeal to low-brow Westerners. He clearly suffers from an inferiority complex and feels tiny and insignificant in Islam's presence. Why the West has overlooked his terrible behavior and pseudo-intellectualism in non-fiction is mind-boggling but not at all surprising- they have made it a habit of theirs to applaud anti-Islamic writing.
An excerpt from an article written by an Indian writer: Naipaul's anti-black sentiments stare out of his novels. Sample his deductions about slavery: 'I asked for a cup of coffee . . . It was a tiny old man who served me. And I thought, not for the first time, that in colonial days the hotel boys had been chosen for their small size, and the ease with which they could be manhandled. That was no doubt why the region had provided so many slaves in the old days: slave peoples are physically wretched, half-men in everything except in their capacity to breed the next generation' (from A Bend in the River, 1979). 'Slave peoples are physically wretched, half-men in everything except in their capacity to breed the next generation.' What makes them physically wretched? Their skin colour which has doomed them to suffer. Their biology. The history of slavery. The Black Holocaust. Years of starvation and poverty. Or is their wretchedness because of the western wish to enslave and exploit? Naipaul has successfully got himself nominated to the top ten racists of this century. At least other modern racists said that slaves are an inferior race, no one had the audacity to call them half-men. That too, half-men in everything. Okay, we shall agree with anything the greatest living writer of this century says. Why then were his grandparents taken to Trinidad as indentured labourers? Was it because they were 'physically wretched, half-men in everything except in their capacity to breed the next generation'? Or would he come up with more compassionate, appealing reasons to suit his arguments? Will he ever stoop low enough to accept his own logic and thought and say that his ancestors were physically wretched and the only human thing about them was breeding the next generation of which Naipaul himself is a product?
Excellent writer but has a terrible inferiority complex. His hate toward Blacks undoubtedly stems from the fact that he resembles a Black man, like most Indians;indeed, it is sometimes impossible to tell an Indian and a Black man apart, and I both are considered Black or colored.