Nobel-winning writer of sharp prose, blunt politics
Trinidad-born author was knighted in 1990
LONDON— V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate whose celebrated writing and brittle, provocative personality drew admiration and revulsion in equal measures, died Saturday at his London home, his family said. Hewas 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 whichwas full of wonderful creativity and endeavor.”
Naipaul 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 a half-century, the writer traveled as a self-described “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 widely praised for its compassion toward the destitute and the displaced, Naipaul himself offended many with his arrogant behavior and jokes about former subjects of empire.
The critic Terry Eagleton once said of Naipaul: “Great art, dreadful politics,” while 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.
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.
“Iwas born there, yes,” he said of Trinidad to an interviewer in 1983. “I thought it was a great mistake.”
In 1950, Naipaul was awarded a government scholarship 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 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 Trinidad ghetto.
In 1959 he won the 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.
His “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. Naipaul received a knighthood in 1990, and in 2001he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
As his literary stature grew, so did his reputation as a difficult, irascible personality. His personal life entered the public domain when the American writer Paul Theroux, a one-time friend whose relationship with Naipaul turned sour, published a stinging memoir about Naipaul in 1998.
Two months after Hale died, Naipaul married his second wife, Pakistani newspaper columnist Nadira Khannum Alvi.