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Nobel-winning writer V.S. Naipaul dies aged 85
LONDON, Aug 12, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – British author V.S. Naipaul, a famously
outspoken Nobel laureate who wrote on the traumas of post-colonial change,
has died at the age of 85.
Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad and the son of an Indian civil servant,
was best known for works including “A House for Mr Biswas” and his Man Booker
Prize-winning “In A Free State”.
“He died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of
wonderful creativity and endeavour,” his wife Lady Nadira Naipaul said in a
statement on Saturday.
She described the outspoken author as a “giant in all that he achieved”.
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul settled in England and studied English
literature at Oxford University on a scholarship. But he spent much of his
time travelling and despite becoming a pillar of Britain’s cultural
establishment, was also a symbol of modern rootlessness.
Naipaul’s early works focused on the West Indies, but came to encompass
countries around the world.
He stirred controversy in the past, describing post-colonial countries as
“half-made societies” and arguing that Islam both enslaved and attempted to
wipe out other cultures.
When he was awarded the 2001 Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish
Academy described him as a “literary circumnavigator, only ever really at
home in himself, in his inimitable voice”.
It said he was “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 his memory of what others have
forgotten, the history of the vanquished,” it said.
Naipaul, who was knighted in 1990, mixed fiction, non-fiction and
autobiography without distinction.
One of his seminal novels was the “A House for Mr Biswas” (1961), which
looked at the almost impossible task for Indian immigrants in the Caribbean
of trying to integrate into society while keeping hold of their roots.
Overall he wrote more than 30 books, and was one of the first winners of
the Booker Prize, now Britain’s leading literary award, in 1971 for “In A
Free State”.
– Violent affair –
During his early career Naipaul was dogged by money worries and loneliness.
He met his first wife, Pat, at Oxford, who became his constant literary
support.
She died in 1996, and he later revealed that he felt he hastened her death
by publicly admitting, while she fought cancer, that he had frequented
prostitutes.
The admission “consumed her. I think she had all the relapses and
everything after that… It could be said that I had killed her,” Naipaul
said in a tell-all biography by British author Patrick French, “The World Is
What It Is: The Authorized Biography Of V.S. Naipaul”.
He had a quarter-century, sometimes violent, affair with an Argentinian,
and he married Pakistani journalist Nadira Alvi the same year Pat died.
He was famously outspoken and had a reputation for cutting people out of
his life, and once retorted: “My life is short. I can’t listen to
banalities.”
The objects of Naipaul’s ire ranged from corruption in Indian politics to
the West’s cynical treatment of its former colonies to the cult of
personality in “The Return of Eva Peron”.
He likened former British prime minister Tony Blair to a pirate at the head
of a socialist revolution, and was also disparaging about “sentimental”
female novelists.
“Women writers are different, they are quite different. I read a piece of
writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
I think (it is) unequal to me,” he told the London Evening Standard newspaper
in 2011.
He said this was due to women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the
world”.
Naipaul also fell out with US travel writer Paul Theroux, who later wrote a
bitter, no-holds-barred memoir of their long association. They later resolved
their differences.
BSS/AFP/MSY/0831 hrs