Nobel laureate V S Naipaul passes away
NOBEL LAUREATE WAS COMPARED IN HIS LIFETIME TO CONRAD, DICKENS AND TOLSTOY, HE WAS ALSO A LIGHTNING ROD FOR CRITICISM
V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel laureate who documented the migrations of peoples and the unravelling of the British Empire in more than a dozen unsparing novels and as many works of nonfiction, died on Saturday at his home in London. He was 85.
In many ways embodying the contradictions of the postcolonial world, Naipaul was born in a family 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. Naipaul personified a sense of displacement. Awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy described him as “a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice.”
Although he spent his literary career mining his origins, Naipaul fiercely resisted the idea of being tethered to a particular ethnic or religious identity. A Hindu, though not observant, Naipaul was a staunch defender of Western civilisation. His guiding philosophy was universalism. “What do they call it? Multi-culti? It’s all absurd, you know,” he said in 2004. “I think if a man picks himself up and comes to another country he must meet it halfway.”
An often difficult man with a fierce temper and a face of hawklike severity who dressed sedately in tweed jackets, Naipaul would sometimes walk out on public appearances and hang up on journalists.
He continued to write novels even after declaring the form a 19th-century relic, no longer able to capture the complexities of the contemporary world.
Prolific life and career
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.
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.
It was in 1954, while toiling in the old EdwardianVictorian hotel that housed the BBC freelancer’s office, that Naipaul began writing fiction. His first novel The Mystic Masseur (1957) about a failed schoolteacher who becomes a masseur and later guru and politician in Trinidad, was well received. Ferociously prolific, Naipaul published a book every year or two for much of his career.
In 1955 Naipaul married Patricia Hale, an Englishwoman he had met at Oxford. The two were extremely close — she read all his work in progress. In 1996, two months after the death of his first wife, Naipaul married Nadira Khannum Alvi, a divorced Pakistani journalist more than 20 years his junior. She survives him. In 2003, Naipaul adopted Nadira’s daughter, Maleeha, then 25.
Awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy described him as “a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice”.