VS Naipaul, literary colossus, dies at 85
LONDON: British author VS Naipaul, a famously outspoken Nobel laureate who wrote on the traumas of post-colonial change, has died at the age of 85.
Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad and the son of an Indian civil servant, was best known for works such as A House for Mr Biswas and his Man Booker Prize-winning In A Free State.
“He died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour,” his wife Lady Nadira Naipaul said in a statement. She described the outspoken author as a “giant in all that he achieved”. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul settled in England and studied English literature at Oxford University on a scholarship.
But he spent much of his time travelling and despite becoming a pillar of Britain’s cultural establishment, was also a symbol of modern rootlessness.
VS Naipaul, the Nobel laureate who died at 85 on Saturday, had so many gifts as a writer — suppleness, wit, an unsparing eye for detail — that he could seemingly do whatever he wanted. What he did want, it became apparent, was to rarely please anyone but himself. The world’s readers flocked to his many novels and books of reportage for “his fastidious scorn,” as the critic Clive James wrote, “not for his large heart.” In his obvious greatness, in the hard truths he dealt, Naipaul attracted and repelled.
He was a walking sack of contradictions, in some ways the archetypal writer of the shifting and migratory 20th century. His life was a series of journeys between old world and new. He was a cool and sometimes snappish mediator between continents. Indian by descent, Trinidadian by birth, Naipaul attended Oxford and lived in London, where he came to wear elegant suits and move in elite social circles.
“When I talk about being an exile or a refugee I’m not just using a metaphor,” he said. “I’m speaking literally.”
His breakthrough book, after three comic works set in the Caribbean, was A House For Mr. Biswas (1961), a masterpiece composed when Naipaul was 29. It has lost none of its sweep and sly humour. It’s about a character, based on Naipaul’s father, who begins his life as a sign painter in Trinidad and Tobago and improbably rises to become a journalist.
The first sign he paints reads, in words the industrious Naipaul seemed to take to heart: “IDLERS KEEP OUT BY ORDER.”
The richest and most eminently re-readable books of Naipaul’s fiction after ‘A House for Mr. Biswas’ include ‘In a Free State,’ an intimate suite of stories concerned with colonialism and the vagaries of power. Set in Egypt, America, Africa and England, it won the Booker Prize in 1971.
It is a mistake to compress
any gifted writer, especially Naipaul, down to his politics. His gifts as an observer are simply too large. But political themes came fully into view.
His instinctive defence of the locals who led restricted lives under colonialism came into crushing conflict with his bleak view of their societies.
Not for him the upbeat, pastel-colored Caribbean novel of uplift. He was pessimistic about the idea of radical political change.
A touchy sense of shame cut through his fiction. “My most difficult thing to overcome was being born in Trinidad,” he said. “That crazy resort place! How on earth can you have serious writing from a crazy resort
place?” He may have won the Nobel Prize in 2001 but, from the start, he was a laureate of humiliation.
He began in the 1960s to write about his travels amid the worlds of his fellow colonials. He wrote about India (‘An Area of Darkness,’ ‘India: A Wounded Civilization’); Argentina, Trinidad and Congo (“The Return of Eva Perón”); and Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia (“Among the Believers”).
He was envied for his successes. “Oh for a black face,” Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1963 to his friend Nancy Mitford after Naipaul had won another literary prize. Naipaul was aware of this sort of racism. He once rewrote the racist slogan “Keep Britain White” by adding a comma: “Keep Britain, White.”
Naipaul’s unsympathetic views of postcolonial life made him among the most controversial writers of his time.
No white Westerner could have spoken as he did.
He wrote of the “primitivism” and “barbarism” of African societies.
He denigrated the country of his birth: “I was born there, yes. I thought it was a mistake.” He was a critic of Islam.
He was loathed by Third World intellectuals and called, among other things, a “restorer of the comforting myths of the white race” (Chinua Achebe) and “a despicable lackey of neocolonialism” (HB Singh).
He had as many ardent defenders. Ian Buruma, editor of The New York Review of Books, thought it was a mistake to view Naipaul as “a dark man mimicking the prejudices of the white imperialists.”
He wrote: “Naipaul’s rage is not the result of being unable to feel the native’s plight; on the contrary, he is angry because he feels it so keenly.”
Naipaul overcame a great deal, including years of neglect, before making it as a writer. He had determination and a sense of destiny. “I knew the door I wanted,” he wrote. “I knocked.”