Conversations With V. S. Naipaul Book

This is a great collection of interviews with Naipaul between 1960 and the early 90s. He discusses his formation as a writer and the incredible panic that he had to undergo during his early days as a writer. He says he never had any natural talent and had to practice intensely to write the way he did. According to Naipaul, he never felt the freedom and safety that someone like Hemingway might have felt when he traveled across the world. He also speaks candidly about his sexual frustration, fears of third world culture taking over the West (where he says people have found a way to live side by side in peace), his irritation with Indian intellectuals who apply borrowed ideas to their own country, the limitations of Hinduism as a religion and his views on some societies which can never seem to get things right.

In one of his 90s interviews he severely criticizes America for fostering barbarians in Afghanistan (he would later say in an interview to the Guardian that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran ought to be destroyed). When asked why there are red dots on the foreheads of Indian women, he says it indicates that there is nothing inside their heads :) :) :).

He really nailed the problem with Indian society when he said "In India it is every man for himself, family for itself and a man has no responsibility except towards his own community".

It is a great read full of brilliant insights. Here is a truly original writer who has serious and well thought out opinions on everything. Naipaul recommends "the life of the mind" and even though Salman Rushdie denounced Naipaul's writing as "a novelist's truth masquerading as objective reality", it is the truth of more people than Rushdie could ever imagine.