A Million Mutinies Now

19 years ago

Nobel laureate and novelist V S Naipaul, who in 2001 stirred a literary firestorm by accusing EM Forster of being a sexual predator and ridiculed Irish author James Joyce as incomprehensible, is now lambasting literary giants Henry James as “the worst writer in the world” and Thomas Hardy as “an unbearable writer” who “doesn’t know how to compose a paragraph.”

In an interview with The Literary Review, Naipaul is equally contemptuous of Jane Austen’s “nonsensical writing” in Northanger Abbey: “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.”

Naipaul is no less scornful of Ernest Hemingway for being “so busy being an American” that he “didn’t know where he was. I find it very difficult to read that kind of writing or to take it seriously.”

Sir Naipaul, arguably Britain’s most accomplished living writers, is equally dismissive of literary heavyweight Charles Dickens: “There’s so much rubbish in Dickens. Wordiness, too many words, repetitiveness.”

Got to hand it to Sir Naipaul, who shot to fame with A House For Mr Biswas. At 73 he is certainly not vapid in his criticism. For the sake of highschoolers worldwide, can he speak to Shakespeare?