The British writer V.S. Naipaul’s previous forays into Africa were fictional: The novels “A Bend in the River” (1979) and “The novel Half a Life” (2001) were both set in nameless African countries. Now he has decided to write a travel book, ‘The Masque of Africa” about the African continent; actually about “magic.”
We already know about Naipaul’s contempt for Africans (and black people in general), so I can only imagine what’s in store for his readers.
The reviews for ‘The Masque of Africa,” , with few exceptions, have not been kind thus far. (Oddly novelist Aminatta Forna reviewing it in The Guardian, is an exception. She writes that she “has grown to like him.”) The thriller writer Robert Harris accused Naipaul of fascism in a review in Britain’s Sunday Times, called him “toxic” and compared Naipaul to Oswald Mosley (ouch). And finally, writing in The New Statesmen (a magazine that oddly has RW Johnson writing for it occasionally) editor Jason Cowley, points to Naipaul’s ahistoricism. Here’s a sample:
So what is it, if not love, that compels him to return so often as a traveller and in search of a subject? “For my travel books I travel on a theme,” he says. “The theme of The Masque of Africa is African belief.” By “African belief” he actually means what he mostly calls “magic” and the rest of us would call animism. Naipaul seems to think that there is something intrinsically and peculiarly African about “magic” – about ancestor worship, witch doctors, totemism, pagan initiation rights and so on – but there isn’t, as any anthropologist would tell you. For Naipaul, the attempt to understand African “magic” is to be “taken far back to the beginning of things”, back to the side of the African that, he writes, “resisted rationality”. He could have saved himself a lot of air miles and no little anguish if he had stayed at home in Wiltshire and read instead, or perhaps reread, James George Frazer’s celebrated comparative study of religion and magic, The Golden Bough, which discusses the cross-cultural similarities of the world’s myths, primitive religions and rituals.
ht: Tom Devriendt
British?
I think he’d certainly like to be British.
For further entertainment:
http://bit.ly/gQka
Read his fiction (Bend in the River). His non-fiction just pisses me off. He is so unbelievabley patronizing and negative. Keep your blood pressure down and don’t read it. Trust me, you will end up reading it because this book will enrage so many people you will want to see what the fuss is about. He is a bit (maybe more) of a weenie.
Miguel Street, was one of my favourite books as a teenager. When I studied more of his works at university I became turned off of him. He also said that nothing good ever came from the Caribbean – that the only thing good that came from the Caribbean was what Europeans put there.
Philip Miller, who set up a meeting with Nadira, Vidia and I when Naipaul was in Johannesburg, says we are in the book, with new names. It turned out to be a very lovely evening with the Naipauls, but am on tenterhooks to see what, if much at all, Vidia took from it. Anecdotally, I should add some context. Two academics who shall remain nameless were also summoned to the drinks evening and at one point Nadira called it all to a sudden halt. “Chop, chop,” she said. “We must leave.” She called me hastily aside. “I’ll just drop my books at the hotel for you tomorrow,” I replied nervously. “No, no!” she exclaimed. “Its these dreadful people. They’re so vain. Won’t you and Philip come with us to dinner?”
It was, as I said, a jovial evening that followed with a little too much sake, but what was really going on in Naiapul’s head, I look forward to reading.