[HN Gopher] V.S. Naipaul: The Grief and the Glory
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       V.S. Naipaul: The Grief and the Glory
        
       Author : paulpauper
       Score  : 60 points
       Date   : 2025-05-04 23:11 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (granta.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (granta.com)
        
       | andrewl wrote:
       | I read Paul Theroux's book _Sir Vidia 's Shadow_ many years ago.
       | It was just one person's account and point of view of course, but
       | it was pretty damning as I recall.
        
         | aaroninsf wrote:
         | The arc of their relationship was quite a thing to follow in
         | real-time. Having been familiar it through both of their
         | accounts and allusions, over years, the fact of their falling
         | out was a mystery until this came out--and helped shore the
         | foundation for just how disappointing humans are.
        
         | bakul wrote:
         | I've read them both and Naipaul is the much better writer.
         | Perhaps that always rankled. Anyway they "buried the hatchet"
         | in 2011.
         | 
         | https://bookertalk.com/poison-pens-when-writers-friendships-...
        
       | FrankWilhoit wrote:
       | The academic pedagogy of the fine arts is absolutely useless. The
       | teaching that purports to be about technique is actually about
       | aesthetics, and the teaching that purports to be about aesthetics
       | is actually about technique. At the level that Naipaul and this
       | article's author are working at, everything is unique and
       | irreproducible, and standards can only be defined by exception:
       | the only statement that can be made is "this is not good enough",
       | and the struggle to specify "this", and why exactly it is not
       | good enough, never ends. I could wish to have had criticism of
       | this kind, but it is an extremely time-intensive process if it is
       | not be (as it usually is) a series of isolated pinprick insights.
        
         | radicaldreamer wrote:
         | Part of being well read is being able to define what the 'this'
         | you mention is and to articulate why you think 'this' is not
         | good enough or is sublime either by using well defined terms
         | and concepts (like control of time, narrative flow, definition
         | of characters, the evocation of the Sanskrit 'rasa') or dipping
         | into one's own inventive abilities to define a new concept for
         | what you're trying to describe, something very common in
         | philosophy.
        
           | FrankWilhoit wrote:
           | My field is music, in which your reductions do not apply, but
           | I will not insult literature by assuming that they apply
           | there either. "Well defined" is the original mirage.
        
       | femiagbabiaka wrote:
       | Great essay. Naipaul's greatest talent aside from his incredible
       | writing was how well he could communicate and project self-
       | loathing, although from reading this essay I'm not sure if he
       | realized it.
        
       | whenc wrote:
       | "....financial precarity (his income through the 1970s averaged
       | PS7,600 a year)"
       | 
       | PS100000 in today's money in 1970. PS35000 in today's money in
       | 1979. Minimum wage today about PS23000.
        
       | xhevahir wrote:
       | Interesting. I just finished A Way In the World yesterday and
       | there's more than one instance in that novel of an older man
       | giving the narrator's work some harsh criticism; "You have passed
       | a stool" was one remark.
        
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