14. apr. 2008

Mørkt forfatterhjerte

Ekstremt åpenhjertig og utleverende V S Naipaul biografi. Låter som obligatorisk lesestoff om man skal tro denne Guardian-omtalen (takk til Morten for tips):


His wife understood from the start both the scale of her husband's ambition and the punitive price to be paid in human terms. He stopped her acting on the grounds that it offended him, refused to buy her a wedding ring ('I had no interest in jewellery,' he explained blandly to his biographer) and stamped out any hope she may have had of an independent career, except in so far as he needed her initially to earn his keep.

Her world contracted as his expanded. He undermined her confidence, derided her opinions and told her she was too dull to take to parties. She stopped travelling with him because, for the last 20 years of her life, he shared his favours with a far more sophisticated and no less compliant Argentinian mistress who crisscrossed the globe at his side, providing services, principally boastful, energetic and violent sex, outside the scope of his mute, sad, stay-at-home wife.

Ingen kommentarer: