Friday 13th tempts fate for celebration of V.S. Naipaul’s life
He was the greatest writer of our age and it was billed as his final farewell. But next week’s memorial for novelist sir Vidia Naipaul at the National Portrait Gallery has been postponed due to the spread of coronavirus.
Publishers from all over the world were invited to gather on Friday, March 13th to pay homage to the Nobel laureate and Booker prize winner whose work has been translated into 34 languages and who died, aged 85, in 2018.
Oscar- winning actor Jeremy Irons had agreed to give a special reading.
a family friend tells me: ‘Nothing ever stopped Vidia from his intrepid travels, be it a revolution in Iran and witchcraft in africa or even genteel uprisings in wiltshire. so it’s entirely understandable that it would have to take something as dramatic as a pandemic pestilence to postpone his final farewell.’
V. s. Naipaul penned more than 30 books, including The enigma Of arrival and a House For Mr Biswas, and was knighted in 1990. Born and brought up in poverty in Trinidad — which he later said was ‘a great mistake’ as he didn’t like the climate or the heat or the loudness and felt he was in the wrong place — he won a government scholarship to read english at Oxford’s University College, where he suffered a nervous breakdown.
The service was being organised for next Friday by his widow Nadira, a distinguished Pakistani writer who protects his legacy with lionesslike grit and charm.
His last book, Grief, about the death of his beloved cat augustus, is being published posthumously.
Naipaul had a famously understated wit, once teasing salman Rushdie by describing ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa on the author as ‘an extreme form of literary criticism’.