Reading 1001 discussion

Read this in 2010. My first book by Naipaul. It is set in an unnamed African country. The narrator is Salim. He is an Indian Muslim, shopkeeper in the interior of post colonial Africa. As he is not fully African, he obseres events as an outsider. Naipaul did visit Zaire in 1975. This book has some controversy as being pro colonialism.

I have a conflicting relationship with Naipaul's writing. Some of it I find very visually rich and evocative, sometimes I find his writing bloated and pompous. This had elements of the former, but also a little too much of the latter for me. I ended up giving it 3 stars.

He styled himself as a post-colonial writer yet writes of Africans as a monolith for the most part that he is uninterested in understanding the cultures of. This is parroted through the protagonist Salim who lacks any discernable interest in the wellbeing of the native people and why they would desire revolution, or even the structural history of African colonialism. His main line of thinking is about the status quo of his shop.

It's really like one review I read said "He's not really a post-colonial writer he is just a cosmopolitan Indian. He's a Bourgeois writer". Which I think is the best way to put it. Which I will admit to feeling smug about since he did claim no woman author had explored colonialism in a substantial way -_- . He should have looked in the mirror more often.