No House for Mrs Biswas

Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul, well-known for his prickly comments, has kicked off another storm with comments that women writers can never match up to him, or men.

Naipaul said in an interview: “Women writers are different, they are quite different. I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think (it is) unequal to me.”

He derided their “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world,” adding “Inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of her house, so that comes over in her writing too.”