[lbo-talk] Arundhati Roy

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Mon Mar 6 06:06:46 PST 2006


Chris wrote:


> I am soooo not ressurecting you on judgment day!
>
> Dolan is a fan of Celine, de Sade, Philip K. Dick and Andrea
> Dworkin... and it shows! He's written two books, one on his growing
> up and one on poetic imagery in English literature.

I happen to like two of the writers you say John Dolan likes, but his diatribe against Arundhati Roy is a thoroughly poor advertising for any book he has written on literature. As for how he grew up, who cares?


> How dare he pick on the defenseless noble-prizewinner!
> ;)

Roy won the Booker Prize, not a Nobel Prize. Some of the Booker Prize winners (like Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, etc.) make political comments -- some good, some bad -- on current affairs, and others appear not to be interested in making any.

In any case, much of Dolan's article is devoted to Roy's looks, not what she wrote in the novel that won the prize or essays on current affairs and what little he writes about her writings is altogether unilluminating for the reason that I mentioned in my reply to B.

The lowest point comes when Dolan says that Roy "fucked her way to fame." There is no need to post sexism of this sort here, let alone TWICE. (I suppose neither you nor B. recognized it as an instance of sexism.)

If you are dying to post a criticism of Roy, post the one that is informative, not a sexist raving like this.

Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org>



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