Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul has stirred up the hornets' nest again, this time with some choice and crusty Old World comments about women, women writers in particular. They are inferior to him, he says, because of their "sentimentality" and "narrow view of the world," and cites Jane Austen. Nonsense, of course; one has only to think only of Marguerite Yourcenar, George Eliot, Edna O'Brien, Edith Wharton, Beryl Bainbridge, Anna Akhmatova, et j'en passe. But this is standard Naipaulese. He enjoys the public attention, while pretending not to. At some level he still can't believe his incredible good fortune: there he is, a poor boy from Trinidad, cocking a snook at the mandarins of the literary establishment! This isn't his only foray into the limelight recently. Only a few days ago he was photographed shaking hands with his one-time protege and nemesis, Paul Theroux, another non-event that landed both of them on page one. Well, so what? Sir VN's nearly 80, and doesn't give a flying frig. And, like that other VN, he thoroughly enjoys riling the bien-pensant literati with outrageous and/or politically incorrect comments. He has a way to go to equal his predecessor's panache, however. "That, for instance," opined Nabokov in Strong Opinions, "Mann's asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak's melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner's corncobby chronicles can be considered 'masterpieces,' or at least what journalists call 'great books,' is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair." Heresy, in most lit-crit circles. Well, that's the job of the writer, in part, to be a heretic. Both VNs have played that role admirably.
