Author V.S. Naipaul, Nobel winner, is dead at 85
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. 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 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, 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.
Among his widely quoted comments: He called India a “slave society,” quipped that Africa has no future, and explained 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,” while Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott complained that the author’s prose was tainted by his “repulsion towards Negroes.”
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, an Anglo-Argentine woman who was married and about a decade younger than he was. It recalled Naipaul’s confession to The New Yorker that he bought sex and was a “great prostitute man,” and recorded Naipaul’s frank and disturbing comments on how that destroyed his wife, Hale, who died of breast cancer in 1996.
“It could be said that I had killed her,” he told biographer Patrick French. “I feel a little bit that way.”
Two months after Hale died, Naipaul married his second wife, Pakistani 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 quietly in an isolated cottage in Wiltshire, in the English countryside.