| V.S. Naipaul | |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 August 1932 Chaguanas, Trinidad |
| Occupation | Novelist, essayist |
| Nationality | Trinidadian |
| Genres | Novel |
| Literary movement | Realism, Postcolonialism |
| Notable work(s) | A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, The Enigma of Arrival, In A Free State |
| Notable award(s) | Booker Prize 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature 2001 |
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul Kt. TC (born 17 August 1932, in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), commonly known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian novelist and essayist of Indo-Trinidadian descent. He is widely considered to be one of the masters of modern English prose.[1] He has been awarded numerous literary prizes including the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (1958), the Somerset Maugham Award (1960), the Hawthornden Prize (1964), the W. H. Smith Literary Award (1968), the Booker Prize (1971), and the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature (1993). V. S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, the centenary year of the award.[2]
In 2008, The Times ranked Naipaul seventh on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[3]
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He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former Pakistani journalist.
Naipaul was married to Englishwoman Patricia Hale for 41 years, until her death due to cancer in 1996. The two shared a close relationship when it came to Naipaul's work—Pat was a sort of unofficial editor for Naipaul—according to the new, authorized biography by Patrick French (although Naipaul is cited with admitting his fear that his devotion to his writing and infidelities may have accelerated Pat's death).[4] As well as regularly visiting prostitutes in London, while she was at work as a school teacher, Naipaul often left her to spend time with his long-time also married mistress, Margaret Gooding. Patrick French has written that Naipaul subjected both wife and mistress to regular sessions of sexual and physical abuse.[5]
Prior to Hale's death, Naipaul proposed to Nadira Naipaul, a divorced Pakistani journalist, born Nadira Khannum Alvi. They were married two months after Hale's death, at which point Naipaul abruptly ended his affair with Margaret Gooding. Nadira Naipaul had worked as a journalist for the Pakistani newspaper, The Nation, for ten years before meeting Naipaul. Nadira was divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul and has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha Naipaul and Nadir.[6]
She is the sister of Maj Gen (Retd) Amir Faisal Alvi, a former chief of the Special Service Group – Pakistan Army, who was later assassinated during the War in North-West Pakistan.[7]
Naipaul insists that his writing transcends any particular ideological outlook, remarking that "to have a political view is to be prejudiced. I don't have a political view." His supporters often perceive as offering a mordant critique of many left-liberal pieties while his detractors, such as Edward Said and Derek Walcott accuse him of being a neo-colonial apologist.[8] Outside of his fiction, Naipaul has expressed sympathy with many right-wing positions. He has stated that the Hindutva are India's last hope against the Muslim invasion. He has also excoriated Tony Blair as a "pirate" at the head of "a socialist revolution", a man who was "destroying the idea of civilisation in this country" and had created "a plebeian culture". [9]
In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." The Committee added, "Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony." The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad:
| “ | Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished. | ” |
His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Literary critic Edward Said, for example, argues that Naipaul "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting what Said classifies as "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies".[10] Said believes that Naipaul's worldview may be most salient in the author's book-length essay The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of exile in England, and the misunderstood, underrepresented work An Area of Darkness.
His works have become required reading in many schools within the developing World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul's following is dramatically stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States.
Writing in the New York Review of Books about Naipaul, Joan Didion offers the following portrayal of the writer:[11]
| “ | The actual world has for Naipaul a radiance that diminishes all ideas of it. The pink haze of the bauxite dust on the first page of Guerrillas tells us what we need to know about the history and social organization of the unnamed island on which the action takes place, tells us in one image who runs the island and for whose profit the island is run and at what cost to the life of the island this profit has historically been obtained, but all of this implicit information pales in the presence of the physical fact, the dust itself... The world Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual human endeavour... This world of Naipaul's is in fact charged with what can only be described as a romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact... | ” |
Naipaul has been criticised for dwelling on some negative aspects of Islam in his works, such as nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul's support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a "creative passion", and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a "mortal wound." He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers.
In 1993 Naipaul was awarded the British David Cohen Prize for Literature.
In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul's sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia's Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier.
In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of "Indian" and "African" and to concentrate on being "Trinidadian". He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad.
In 2008, writer Patrick French released the first authorized biography of Naipaul, which portrayed a tormented, and tormenting, personal life.[12]
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