Nobel-winning author Naipaul dies aged 85
london — British author V.S. 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 including 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 on Saturday.
VS Naipaul, the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate whose precise and lyrical writing in such novels as A Bend in the River and A House for Mr. Biswas and brittle, misanthropic personality made him one of the world’s most admired and contentious writers, died on Saturday at his London home, his family said. He was 85.
His wife, Nadira Naipaul, said he was “a giant in all that he achieved and he died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour.”
His friend and fellow author Paul Theroux said that he had been in poor health, but had taken pride in having his work recognised.
“He will go down as one of the greatest writers of our time,” Theroux told The Associated Press during a telephone interview on Saturday, citing his mastery of writing about families and colonialism. “He also never wrote falsely. He was a scourge of anyone who used a cliche or an un-thought out sentence. He was very scrupulous about his writing, very severe, too.”
Naipaul’s fiction and nonfiction reflected his personal journey from Trinidad to London and various stops in developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.”
In an extraordinary career spanning half a century, Naipaul traveled as a self-described “barefoot colonial” from his rural childhood to upper class England, and was hailed as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. From A Bend in the River to The Enigma of Arrival to Finding the Centre, Naipaul’s books explored colonialism and decolonisation, exile and the struggles of the everyman in the developing world.
He was critical of colonialism, but set himself apart from any social movements. He saw himself as a realist, cured of illusions, his outlook defined by the famous opening words of A Bend in the River that became the title of a biography by Patrick French: The world is what it is.
He was equally sceptical of religion and politics, of idealism of any kind, whether revolutionary uprisings or of quests for paradise such as Sir Walter Raleigh’s search for the non-existent El Dorado.
“If you come from the New World, as I in large measure do, you see all the absurd fantasies people have taken there and the troubles they have wrought as a result,” Naipaul told The Associated Press in 2000. “We were not given a proper history of the New World itself. This was not out of wickedness. It was out of ignorance, out of indifference, out of the feelings that the history of this very small island was not important. These aspects one had to learn and writing took me there. One didn’t begin with knowledge. One wrote oneself into knowledge.” Naipaul prided himself on his candor, but he had a long history of offensive remarks.
Among his widely quoted comments: He called India a “slave society,” quipped that Africa has no future, and explained that Indian women wear a coloured dot on their foreheads to say “my head is empty.” He laughed off the 1989 fatwa by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie as “an extreme form of literary criticism.”
The critic Terry Eagleton once said of Naipaul: “Great art, dreadful politics.” Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott complained that the author’s prose was tainted by his “repulsion towards Negroes.” CLR. James, a fellow Trinidadian writer, put it differently: Naipaul’s views, he wrote, simply reflected “what the whites want to say but dare not.”
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul — Vidia to those who knew him — was born on August 17, 1932 in Trinidad, a descendant of impoverished Indians shipped to the West Indies as bonded laborers.
His father was an aspiring, self-taught novelist whose ambitions were killed by lack of opportunity; the son was determined to leave his homeland as soon as he could. In later years, he would repeatedly reject his birthplace as little more than a plantation.
“I was born there, yes,” he said of Trinidad to an interviewer in 1983. “I thought it was a great mistake.”
In 1950, Naipaul was awarded one of a few available government scholarships to study in England, and he left his family to begin his studies in English literature at University College, Oxford.
There he met his first wife, Patricia Hale, whom he married in 1955 without telling his family.
After graduation, Naipaul suffered a period of poverty and unemployment: he was asthmatic, starving and depending on his wife for income.
Despite his Oxford education, he found himself surrounded by a hostile, xenophobic London.
“These people want to break my spirit ... They want me to know my place,” he wrote bitterly to his wife.
Naipaul eventually landed a radio job working for BBC World Service, where he discussed West Indian literature and found his footing as a writer.
His breakthrough came in 1957 with his first published novel The Mystic Masseur, a humorous book about the lives of powerless people in a ghetto. —
Sir VS Naipaul will be remembered for his extensive works, which covered diverse subjects. Narendra Modi, Indian Prime Minister
Even if you disagreed with that he wrote, you couldn’t help be stimulated by the brilliance of his vision. William Dalrymple, An author and historian I came to India first because of curiosity about my ancestral land. My publisher agreed to pay me an advance for anything I would write on India. VS Naipul