V S Naipaul, the literary giant who delighted in being controversial
AUTHOR Sir V S Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001, has died at his home in London aged 85, his family announced yesterday.
Sir Vidia, who won numerous coveted literary awards, wrote 30 books including critically acclaimed novels such as In A Free State and A Bend In the River.
His wife, Nadira, called him a ‘giant in all that he achieved’ and said he had died surrounded by ‘those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour’. He was raised as a Hindu and brought up in Trinidad before moving to England at 18 after receiving a scholarship to University College, Oxford.
He left university in 1954 and his first novel – The Mystic Masseur – was published three years later. In 1961 he published his most celebrated novel, A House For Mr Biswas, which took more than three years to write.
American author Paul Theroux, who had a bitter 15-year feud with Sir Vidia before reconciling, said: ‘He will go down as one of the greatest writers of our time.’
V idia Naipaul was, in my view, the literary godchild of dickens and Conrad. His earliest published comic prize-winning novels such as The Mystic Masseur (1957) and Miguel Street (1959), were recognised almost immediately, as the works of an outstanding master.
He went on to become one of the truly great writers of his time, justly awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001.
His canvas was wide – nothing less than the world itself, in all the confusions of a post-imperial era.
Born in Trinidad, the grandchild of imported indian labourer, it was his journalist father – whose affectionate portrait was drawn in the immortal 1961 novel a House For Mr Biswas – who filled his sons with his own reverence for the printed word. Vidia’s younger brother Shiva was also a writer.
Vidia went to Oxford on a scholarship, worked for the BBC’s Caribbean Voices, and was quickly taken up by the London literary world.
The novelist anthony Powell was an early champion and friend, as was Powell’s niece Lady antonia Fraser.
in andre deutsch, himself a refugee in London from Hungary, he found a publisher who championed his wistfully pessimistic view of the human condition.
Though Naipaul wrote in prose, he was the great poet of exile, revealing in book after book, fictional and non-fictional, that none of us are really at home on this bewildering, filthy, beautiful but confused planet.
While at Oxford, Vidia met and later married a fellow-student Pat Hale, a wife to whom he was unfaithful and who had quite a hard time of it, but who was his loyal friend and champion until her death from cancer in 1996. His second wife, Nadira alvi, a great beauty and distinguished journalist, was his companion to the end.
in his work, Naipaul was scathingly contemptuous of what he saw as the folly and hypocrisy of the human race.
‘The Europeans wanted gold and slaves like everybody else, but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves,’ he wrote.
HiS first book about india, an area of darkness, caused howls of dismay, not only in india but in the West, for while recognising the wonder of that land, he depicted its squalor.
For his books on africa, especially in a Free State, he was denounced – absurdly – as fascist.
He once said that ‘if a writer does not generate hostility, he is dead’. While this may be true, he took an undisguised delight in being deliberately offensive.
His fellow-writer Paul Theroux wrote an extremely funny memoir of Naipaul, a catalogue of impossible behaviour. a friend of mine, a French diplomat, found herself beside him at dinner one night and suffered an uninterrupted hour in which he informed her that every single French writer, from Victor Hugo to Emile Zola, from Balzac to Proust, was no good. Then he fell asleep.
More or less teetotal, he was not drunk when he made these tirades, he simply liked upsetting people.
He caused international outage for supporting the Hindu nationalists in india, and, though married to a Muslim, he was accused inevitably of islamophobia.
What will remain is not the reputation for belligerence, but the luminous quality of his prose, the perspicacity of his writing, and, behind the curmudgeonly manners, a spark which could make him hilarious company.