Battle of The Sexist: Nitwit Naipual Does It Again!

I tend not to begrudge writers their Nobel Prizes, but holy crap... V.S. Naipaul... I'm speechless. Before he won the thing he was shameless in his fishing attempts. Not that anyone cares about author's biographies on the inside flap of books, but Naipaul had the wankiest line of all time in his. It read (and I paraphrase here), "V.S. Naipaul has won every major literary award in the world except the Nobel Prize." Wow. Staggering. I guess he was confident that when - there was no "if" for Naipaul - he did win it, all his works would have to be reprinted, at which time he could remove the line and replace it with something to the effect of "In 2001, V.S. Naipaul was the greatest writer ever to win the Nobel Prize, an award that was invented over a century before and only given out as practice for when they could finally build up the courage to bestow it upon such an extraordinary human being."

By all accounts Naipaul is a shit. Just ask his old buddy Paul Theroux. Heck, Naipaul even makes Saramago look like a saint. So about three minutes after apparently swallowing a fraction of his pride (and broadcasting it on The New Yorker website), the schmuck has gone and done it again. In an interview with the Royal Geographic Society, he deigned to say that no female writer is his literary equal. Not even Jane Austen. The reason? A woman's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world... Inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too." There are so many things wrong with that statement I don't even know where to start.

Suffice to say, as good a writer as Naipaul might be, his embarrassingly limited appreciation for anyone other than himself is laughable. Or maybe we've just misunderstood him. Perhaps it was a rare admission of his own fallibility. Then again there's something to his statement. I can't think of many women writers who are his equal. His superior, sure, but not his equal. Oh wait... Wait... Alert the press. I just thought of someone I'd put on par with him. Yes, it's fellow Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek. Ooooh... That must hurt.