The Black Isle

Excerpt from a Bookforum piece about Patrick French’s V.S. Naipaul biography The World is What It Is:

Born (as he has reminded us countless times) in Trinidad in 1932 (“I thought it was a great mistake,” he told Bernard Levin in a 1983 interview), the young Vidia became alienated from the Hindu culture and religion of his family at an early age. Hindu caste is patrilineal, and though he inherited “the implied ‘caste sense’” of his mother’s family, he claimed to reject it; his father’s background, he reported, was “confused in my mind.” Actually, he would embrace little of his island’s culture, no matter from which ethnic group. In a 1958 edition of the Times Literary Supplement, he described Trinidad as “a simple colonial philistine society,” and as he would later reveal in The Middle Passage (1962), he rejected just about everything from his homeland, including steel bands, “a sound I detested,” and the annual Carnival, which “has always depressed me.”

Favorite books read in 2008:
1. A BEND IN THE RIVER (V.S. Naipaul)
2. THE LEOPARD (Lampedusa)
3. BECALMED (J.K. Huysmans)
4. BLOOD MERIDIAN (Cormac McCarthy)
5. SACRED GAMES (Vikram Chandra)

Also: KRAMERS ERGOT 7, THE WHITE TIGER (Aravind Adiga), FIELDWORK (Mischa Berlinski), DON’T LOOK NOW: THE STORIES OF DAPHNE DUMAURIER (in particular, “The Birds” and “Don’t Look Now”) republished by NYRB, CLASSICAL CHINESE POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY (ed. David Hinton).

Next year, Big Fat Books:
MATING by Norman Rush
2666 by Roberto Bolano
TALE OF GENJI and/or WAR AND PEACE and/or A SUITABLE BOY

1907-1909