Last night, at random, I finally started to read my long-languishing copy of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. She is absolutely brilliant; if you haven’t read Interpreter of Maladies, you are denying yourself a treat. She is also disturbingly beautiful.
Less so is V.S. Naipaul, a writing god who walks among us, especially if you ask Paul Theroux. By chance, I was able to browse the printed-on-paper edition of today’s New York Times, which includes a review of a new biography of Sir Vidia. Good writer; bad man; but you have to hand it to the publisher for including Theroux’s blurb on the back cover: “It seems I didn’t know half of all the horrors.”
This must be my week for Indian and Indian-American writers. Anything by Theroux is a pretty good bet, too.
