LITERATURE LOSES ITS ‘LIGHTNING ROD’, NAIPAUL DIES AT 85
Trinidad-born Indian-origin author V S Naipaul, known for his critical commentary on colonialism, religion, and politics, died at the age of 85, his family said on Sunday. “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 endeavour,” his wife Nadira said. Naipaul died in his London home.
Nobel laureate V S Naipaul, who documented the migrations of peoples, the unraveling of the British Empire, the ironies of exile and the clash between belief and unbelief in more than a dozen unsparing novels and as many works of nonfiction, died on Saturday at his home in London. He was 85.
His family confirmed the death in a statement, The Associated Press reported.
In many ways embodying the contradictions of the postcolonial world, Naipaul was born of Indian ancestry in Trinidad, went to Oxford University on a scholarship and lived the rest of his life in England, where he forged one of the most illustrious literary careers of the last half-century. He was knighted in 1990.
Compared in his lifetime to Conrad, Dickens and Tolstoy, he was also a lightning rod for criticism, particularly by those who read his portrayals of third-world disarray as apologies for colonialism.
Yet Naipaul exempted neither coloniser nor colonised from his scrutiny. He wrote of the arrogance and self-aggrandisement of the colonisers, yet exposed the self-deception and ethical ambiguities of the liberation movements that swept across Africa and the Caribbean in their wake. He brought to his work moral urgency and a novelist’s attentiveness to individual lives and triumphs.
Naipaul personified a sense of displacement. Having left behind the circumscribed world of Trinidad, he was never entirely rooted in England. In awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy described him as “a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at homein himself, in his inimitable voice.”
Yet his existential homelessness was as much willed as fated. Although he spent his literary career mining his origins, Naipaul fiercely resisted the idea of being tethered to a hyphen, or to a particular ethnic or religious identity. He once left a publisher when he saw himself listed in the catalog as a “West Indian novelist.” A Hindu, though not observant, Naipaul was a staunch defender of Western civilisation. His guiding philosophy was universalism.
An ancestry in India Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born on August 17, 1932, in Chaguanas, Trinidad, where his paternal grandfather had emigrated from India in the 1880s as an indentured servant to work on the sugar plantations. His father, Seepersad, was a newspaper reporter for The Trinidad Guardian and an aspiring fiction writer who as a child was luckily allowed to go to school; his older brother was sent to work in the cane fields for eight cents a day and his sister remained illiterate. His mother, Droapatie Capildeo, was from a large, prosperous family, and when Naipaul was 6 the family moved in with them in a big house in Port of Spain.
The second of seven children, he was particularly close to his older sister, Kamla. His younger and only brother, Shiva, who was also a novelist, died in 1985. Educated in English schools in Trinidad, Naipaul said he owed his writing ambitions to his father, who read to him, among other things, from Booker T Washington’s Up From Slavery.
His first years in England in the 1950s were full of panic and anxiety. In 1952, while at University College, Oxford, he had a mental breakdown.
“Before I became secure as a writer, it was a long, unbroken period of melancholy,” he told The New Yorker in 1994. From 1954 to 1956, he edited a radio program on literature for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Caribbean Service. His voice was perfect for the airwaves— rich and mellowed by tobacco. His crisp English accent had a slight Caribbean twist, and he often repeated phrases for emphasis. “I speak 130 words a minute,” he told The New York Times in 2005. “I know this precisely from my radio days.”
In 1955 Naipaul married Patricia Hale, an Englishwoman he had met at Oxford. The two were extremely close but their relationship was puzzling to outsiders, many of whom saw her as self-effacing and subservient. Although she often travelLed with Naipaul, Hale is mentioned only once in his books, and not by name. The couple never had children. His childlessness, he told The New Yorker in 1994, “really comes from a detestation of the squalling background of children that I grew up with in my extended family.” He also confessed that he had been “a great prostitute man” in the early years of his marriage and acknowledged that in the 1970s he had fallen in love with an Anglo-Argentine woman who became his longtime