Sunday Read: Meet the VS Naipaul of Roberto Bolano’s “Scholars of Sodom”
The late Chilean novelist Robert Bolano imagines VS Naipaul in Buenos Aires in the short story “Scholars of Sodom”. The story, which appears in The New York Review of Books, is taken from Bolano’s The Secret of Evil, forthcoming from New Directions:
It’s 1972 and I can see V.S. Naipaul strolling through the streets of Buenos Aires. Well, sometimes he’s strolling, but sometimes, when he’s on his way to meetings or keeping appointments, his gait is quick and his eyes take in only what he needs to see in order to reach his destination with a minimum of bother, whether it’s a private dwelling or, more often, a restaurant or a café, since many of those who’ve agreed to meet him have chosen a public place, as if they were intimidated by this peculiar Englishman, or as if they’d been disconcerted by the author of Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas when they met him in the flesh and had thought: Well, I didn’t think it would be like this, or: This isn’t the man I’d imagined, or: Nobody told me.
Book details
- The Secret of Evil by Roberto Bolano
EAN: 9780811218153
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Apr
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