PROMINENT AUTHORS--particularly ones that win the Nobel Prize in literature--are not necessarily known for their humility.
But the prize for arrogance should be awarded to Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, for his recent lashing out at female authors.
According to Britain's Guardian:
In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society...about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the "greatest living writer of English prose," was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: "I don't think so." Of [Jane] Austen, he said he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world."
He felt that women writers were "quite different." He said: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."
The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world." "And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said.
He added: "My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don't mean this in any unkind way."
The criticism from the author is unsurprising. Naipaul is no stranger to criticism. In the past, Naipaul has criticized India's top female authors for their "banality" on the topic he is best known for writing about, the legacy of British colonialism.
Naipaul is also famous for unapologetically discussing his sadistic mental and physical abuse of his wife and mistress. In a biography, he spoke of a beating he gave to his mistress, stating, "I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt...She didn't mind at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn't appear really in public. My hand was swollen."
Unsurprisingly, he's also a virulent Islamophobe.
