Audit doesn’t fault DCFS
Review finds agency took ‘considerable actions’ in the case of Anthony Avalos, 10.
A county review found that the Department of Children and Family Services took “considerable actions” in the case of 10-year-old Anthony Avalos, but nonetheless made a series of recommendations to minimize risks to other children in the future.
The report by Michael Nash, head of the county’s Office of Child Protection, drew a clear distinction between the child welfare system’s failings preceding the horrific death in 2013 of 8year-old Gabriel Fernandez and how it dealt with complaints in Anthony’s case.
The boy died in June after suffering abuse. His mother and her boyfriend have been charged with murder.
“While the death of Anthony was horrible, heartbreaking, and apparently brutal; while it occurred in
The Trinidad-born Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, whose celebrated writing and brittle, provocative personality drew admiration and revulsion in equal measures, died 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 endeavor.”
Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in 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, the writer traveled as a selfdescribed “barefoot colonial” from rural Trinidad to upper-class England, picked up the most coveted literary awards and a knighthood, and was hailed as one of the greatest English writers of the 20th century.
Naipaul’s books explored colonialism and decolonization, exile and the struggles of the everyman in the developing world — themes that mirror his personal background and trajectory.
Although his writing was praised for its compassion toward the destitute and the displaced, Naipaul offended many with his arrogant behavior and jokes about former subjects of the empire.
Among his widely quoted comments: He called India a “slave society,” quipped that Africa has no future, and exhumorous
plained that Indian women wear a colored dot on their foreheads to say “my head is empty.” He laughed off the 1989 fatwa 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.”
C. L. R. 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 Aug. 17, 1932, in Trinidad, a descendant of impoverished Indians shipped to the West Indies as bonded laborers.
In 1950, he 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 Patricia Hale, whom he married in 1955.
After graduation, Naipaul suffered a period of poverty and unemployment: He was asthmatic, starving and dependent 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 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
book about the lives of powerless people in a Trinidad ghetto.
Naipaul caught the eye of reviewers, and in 1959 he won the Somerset Maugham Award with the story collection “Miguel Street.”
In 1961, Naipaul published “A House for Mr. Biswas,” which was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece. That novel, about how one man’s life was restricted by the limits of colonial society, was a tribute to Naipaul’s father.
In the years that followed, Naipaul was to travel for extensive periods to write journalistic essays and travel books. He flew three times to India, his ancestral home, to document its culture and politics. He spent time in Buenos Aires to write about Argentina’s former First Lady Eva Peron, and went to Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia for books about Islam.
Years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Naipaul devoted attention to Islamic radicalism in books including “Among the Believers” and “Beyond Belief.” In its Nobel citation, the Swedish Academy called him “a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself.”
Naipaul’s nonfiction often provoked anger, and many were offended by his views about Islam and India — Rushdie, for example, thought Naipaul was promoting Hindu nationalism.
He also continued to publish award-winning novels. “The Mimic Men” won the W.H. Smith Award in 1967, and in 1971 “In a Free State,” a meditation on colonialism in Africa, was awarded the Booker Prize.
Africa also provided the setting for his 1979 novel “A Bend in the River.” His life of
travel and transitions was reflected in the 1987 novel “The Enigma of Arrival,” which some considered his masterpiece.
Naipaul received a knighthood in 1990, and in 2001 was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
As his literary stature grew, so did his reputation as a difficult, irascible personality. Naipaul was a private man and did not have many friends, but his personal life entered the public domain when the American writer Paul Theroux, a onetime friend whose relationship with Naipaul turned sour, published a stinging memoir about Naipaul in 1998.
“Sir Vidia’s Shadow” described Naipaul as a racist, sexist miser who threw terrifying tantrums and beat up women.
Naipaul ignored Theroux’s book, but he did authorize a candid biography that confirmed some of Theroux’s claims. The biography, published in 2008, devoted chapters to how Naipaul met and callously treated his mistress, who was married and about a decade younger.
It recalled Naipaul’s confession to The New Yorker that he was a “great prostitute man,” and recorded his frank and disturbing comments on how that destroyed his wife, Hale, who died of breast cancer in 1996.
Months after Hale died, Naipaul married newspaper columnist Nadira Khannum Alvi. Naipaul’s later books lost their playful humor, and some say much of their appeal.
He spent much of his time living in Wiltshire, in the English countryside.