Gregory Duke > Recent Status Updates

The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) - 1.5/5

Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion: 2.5/5

This feels like the beginnings of Naipaul's later novels, those that are bleak, complex, plotless, internal, and unrelentingly committed to bringing fresh eyes to notions of class, work, life's value, etc. It's just dull here though. Interesting to see Naipaul write a white narrator/protagonist, particularly one who is British.

Finished The Suffrage of Elvira. Much more than The Mystic Masseur, it feels like Naipaul is tapping into his mixture of the absurd and the hyperreal and the humanist that seems to characterize his early career. The first line is one of the best first lines I've read in a while. It becomes integral yet vain, superficially racist yet actually subversive to white/colonial readership.

Yikes every odd-numbered chapter SUCKS

Chapter Three is one of the more annoying, useless things I've read in a while. Otherwise, I've had a good time even if this is so clearly lesser than Gravity's Rainbow. We shall see how Esther's nose job goes.