How does Roy's political writing play in India?
Doug
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The eXile's John Dolan savages her here:
Great Literary Frauds of Our Time
Brought to you by ENRON
With your host Dr. John Dolan FRAUD #1 Arundhati Roy: The Goddess of Big Lies She was voted one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" by People Magazine. That was in 1998; she's officially "in her late thirties" now, her age blurring like her prose; but it will always be her very young self which stares out from the book jackets of her one and only novel. Her face is turned toward the camera with a sleepy, pouting expression straight out of Playboy, her winsome curls as damp as her big brown eyes, her reassuringly Aryan features conveniently enclosed by demonstrably non-white skin.
Her interviews, usually conducted by a trembling, menopausal Commonwealth zhurnalistka, slither toward softcore when describing her: "An explosion of curly black hair...showcases nearly childlike, saucer eyes and cheekbones that erupt the moment she talks or smiles."
She is "the first Indian citizen to win a Booker Prize and a million-dollar book deal." She copyrighted the whole high-culture section of the "intercaste lovemaking" market - and remember, that's the biggest market of all, the basis of bodice-rippers like Mandingo, She Was A Pirate's Booty, Barbarian Concubine, and Captive Princess. Her novel is praised around the world by dotards like John Updike, who drove the populist ball straight onto the green by calling it "a Tiger Woodsian debut." But most of her fans prefer to praise her writing in terms like "luscious," "sensual," and "extravagant" - the rhetoric of high-priced ice-cream bars.
She is also a saint, the latest great Aryan hope from the land which gave us Gandhi, Nehru and the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh - virtually all of the most tedious saints of the last century. She is said to have left home at 16 to live in a squatter's colony in Delhi, earning a living collecting beer bottles. Our Lady of Recycling, who even in starvation made a career of high-profile virtue. She is supposed to be the pure product of the fertile soil of Kerala, site of her one and only novel. Like all Indian saints, her dream is to scold the rich and successful countries for their lack of...their lack of...something or other. Virtue, poverty, skin diseases, flies around the eyes...something. She put her nobel-prizewinning life on the line to oppose a dam which would displace thousands of villagers.
And she is a fraud. A literary careerist who has parlayed an overwritten melodrama into unearned fame; a child of privilege whose early experiments in poverty were no more than a smart career move; a Yuppie whose real job was aerobics instructor, not slum bottle-recycler; a world-travelled, overeducated dilettante posing as a regional writer; and a fake saint who fucked her way to fame and survives, in spite of her complete lack of talent, because her crude scolding warms the heart of old British lefties who love it when their tame Indian slaves get up on their hind legs to denounce the bloody Americans, who oppress the world so much less skillfully than they used to.
http://www.exile.ru/138/great_literatury_frauds_of_our_time.html
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