No More Great Writers?

Publishing has gone down in quality so much in recent years and the problem is that there is no literary life any more because there are quite simply no more great writers ...

so said Sir V.S. Naipaul at the Hay festival.

Does he include himself in that analysis, I wonder?

Postscript (2/6/08) :

It really is hate Naipaul season! St. Lucia poet Derek Walcott has :

... reignited a simmering row with VS Naipaul by unveiling a stinging attack on the author - in verse. ...

according to Daniel Trilling in The Guardian. You can read an extract from The Mongoose here.

Nasty Naipaul

You might remember Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow, the novelist and travel writer's memoir of his 30 year (somewhat troubled) relationship with the author V.S. Naipaul, who was once his mentor and friend.

Now in the Times, Theroux responds to a new biography which he sees as complete vindication for his own harsh treatment of Sir Vidia between the pages. Describing Naipaul as :

... a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain. He was then, and continued to be, an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons – none of which he pursued.

reading Patrick French’s authorised (!) biography, The World Is What It Is, he finds that he didn't know :

... the half of all the horrors. ... Now French’s biography amply demonstrates everything I said and more. It is not a pretty story; it will probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions, his whoremongering, his treatment of a sad, sick wife and disposable mistress, his evasions, his meanness, his cruelty amounting to sadism, his race baiting. Then there is the “gruesome sex”, the blame shifting, the paranoia, the disloyalty, the nasty cracks and the whining, the ingratitude, the mood swings, the unloving and destructive personality.

Sounds completely unmissable actually!

(Thanks Jordan for the link.)

Travelling Companions

It's Northern hemisphere summer, and folks there are revving their internal engines for long trips to exotic climes. Books are part of the holiday experience for most, and the newspapers traditionally have their lists of holiday reads.

Sam Leith in the Telegraph reckons that reading on holiday is a material pleasure as well as an intellectual one, he reckons:

A good book returns from a good holiday battered and discoloured, with sand in odd crevices, with mysterious stains and pages missing, with mild spinal injuries and a new lover or two. Just like its owner. ... One hardback will have a semi-translucent, coconut-smelling thumb-print on a right-hand page. A paperback will be a fat, crinkly, chlorine-damaged wad after it joined you in the pool when the kids upset your lilo. Another paperback, left splayed for an hour in full sun so that the heat melted the glue in its spine, is shedding pages into your bag. The book becomes a souvenir of the pleasure you took in it and the place where you read it.

But what should a holiday read be like? Something light and frothy? The things we've always meant to get round to reading? A big classic novel (which is what Leith himself favours).

The Guardian asked authors (here and here) which books they have taken with them on journeys. JG Ballard writes nostalgically about a a copy of the Los Angeles Yellow Pages which he took from his suite at the Beverly Hills Hilton, and which he says transformed his holiday. And Paul Theroux recounts his experiences reading Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas on board a ship between Singapore and Borneo in 1970, in the company of what seemed "like a cast from a Maugham novel".

My happiest reading memory was reading Theroux's O-Zone in a hammock on Tioman. I'd travelled there alone, and was staying at the wonderful but basic Nazri's Place with nothing to do all day but read and snorkel. (Leave food out of the equation: there was basically only a choice between freshly caught mackerel and tuna each meal time!)

Absorbing fiction about a future America, rigidly divided by social class, seemed to go very well with stunning island scenery. Don't ask me why!

Mind you, I think you can go too far with dystopian fiction on a beach ... one of the suggestions for beach reading for the summer of 2007 at the end of Leith's article is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The most bleakly desolate novel ... perhaps of all time ... has no place in anyone's beach bag, I'd say.

It's fun trying to choose book to fit holiday location and Sam Jordison on the Guardian blog writes about trying to find the perfect match.

I read Colin McPhee's A House in Bali, the first time I stayed in Ubud and it was a magical match. McPhee's book was written in the 1930's. The musicologist/composer heard some recordings of Balinese gamelan and travelled to the island to learn study it. The book gives an insight not only into the music but also a fascinating glimpse into into Balinese society. My biggest thrill though was in meeting one of the people McPhee had written about all those years before - a dance teacher who was still training performers. (And it was very special to me years later to hear the piece based on gamelan that McPhee composed, played by the Malaysian Philharmonic.)

What was your best holiday reading experience?

Naipaul Gets Binned, Jodie Gets Book Deal

Think literary agents and publishers are fickle?

Found a link to this incredible story from the Sunday Times on Zafar's blog (and Zafar found it in Kitabkhana's blog and while it's still fresh you might want to pass it on some more because it might make a writer near you feel better about that rejection slip).

Being 29, blonde, good-looking and vaguely famous should be enough to get you a book published nowadays.

says novelist/critic David Taylor. Having read this morning that the ghastly Jodie Marsh of Celebrity Big Brother fame has just scooped a five book deal I would say his cynicism is well placed.

And those of you who don't know the programme, consider yourself very very lucky. This is television of the lowest ugliest gutter-crawling kind ... and I was hooked.

The Novel Is Dead ... Long Live the Novel

Is fiction really still up to telling the truth about our turbulent times?

VS Naipaul declared the novel dead in a New York Times interview last month. (You can also listen to an extract here.)

Now, novelist Jay McInerney, (himself a witness to the tragedy of 9/11) makes a convincing case for the continued relevance of fiction in the Guardian .

Leon Wing's very articulate take on the article can be read here. Leon also provides further proof, (if further proof is necessary!) that the form is alive an kicking by invoking Patrick McGrath’s novel, Port Mungo. (One I'll have to read now - thanks Leon.)

I also fail to see signs of the novel's untimely demise. Quite the opposite. (I've slipped between the covers of John Banville's The Sea now and am totally seduced: this is fiction writing alive and kicking!)

Still, one needs folks like Naipaul to take an extreme position now and again so that others can have the pleasure of knocking him down.

McInvery made me smile with this thought:

The only reason we listen to Naipaul is because he wrote A House for Mr Biswas and A Bend in the River. If the novel doesn't matter any more then his opinion wouldn't seem to count for more than my doorman's opinion.

Quite!