V. S. Naipaul
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| V.S. Naipaul | |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 August 1932 Chaguanas, Trinidad |
| Occupation | Novelist, essayist |
| Genres | Novel |
| Literary movement | Realism |
| Notable work(s) | A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River,The Enigma of Arrival |
| Notable award(s) | Booker Prize 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature 2001 |
V. S. Naipaul (Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Kt., TC) (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago, of Indo-Trinidadian descent), is a British novelist and essayist who 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]
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[edit] Assessment of his work
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. Edward Said, for example, complains 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".[3] 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:[4]
| “ | 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... | ” |
In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised[citation needed] for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. 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."[citation needed] He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation.[citation needed] He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers.[citation needed]
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. [5]
In 1993 Naipaul was awarded the British David Cohen Prize for Literature.
[edit] Personal life
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).[6] As well as regularly visiting prostitutes in London, while she was at work as a school teacher, Naipaul often abandoned his wife to travel with Margaret Gooding, a married Anglo-Argentinian woman who he had met in 1972.[7]
Two months after Hale's death, Naipaul abruptly ended his affair with Margaret Murray to marry Nadira Naipaul, a divorced Pakistani journalist, born Nadira Khannum Alvi. She 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. [8]
She is the sister of Maj Gen (Retd) Amir Faisal Alvi, a former chief of the Special Service Group - Pakistan Army.[9]
[edit] Bibliography
Fiction
- The Mystic Masseur - (1957) (film version: The Mystic Masseur (2001))
- The Suffrage of Elvira - (1958)
- Miguel Street - (1959)
- A House for Mr Biswas - (1961)
- Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion - (1963)
- A Flag on the Island - (1967)
- The Mimic Men - (1967)
- In a Free State - (1971)
- Guerrillas - (1975)
- A Bend in the River - (1979)
- Finding the Centre - (1984)
- The Enigma of Arrival - (1987)
- A Way in the World - (1994)
- Half a Life - (2001)
- Magic Seeds - (2004)
Non-fiction
- The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies - British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America (1962)
- An Area of Darkness (1964)
- The Loss of El Dorado - (1969)
- The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (1972)
- India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)
- A Congo Diary (1980)
- The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad (1980)
- Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981)
- Finding the Centre (1984)
- Reading & Writing: A Personal Account (2000)
- A Turn in the South (1989)
- India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)
- Bombay (1994, with Raghubir Singh)
- Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998)
- Between Father and Son: Family Letters (1999, edited by Gillon Aitken)
- The Writer and the World: Essays - (2002)
- Literary Occasions: Essays (2003, by Pankaj Mishra)
- A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (2007)
[edit] Further reading
- Girdharry, Arnold (2004) The Wounds of Naipaul and the Women in His Indian Trilogy (Copley).
- Barnouw, Dagmar (2003) Naipaul's Strangers (Indiana University Press).
- Dissanayake, Wimal (1993) Self and Colonial Desire: Travel Writings of V.S. Naipaul (P. Lang).
- French, Patrick (2008) The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (Random House)
- Hamner, Robert (1973). V.S. Naipaul (Twayne).
- Hammer, Robert ed. (1979) Critical Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul (Heinemann).
- Hayward, Helen (2002) The Enigma of V.S. Naipaul: Sources and Contexts (Macmillan).
- Hughes, Peter (1988) V.S. Naipaul (Routledge).
- Jarvis, Kelvin (1989) V.S. Naipaul: A Selective Bibliography with Annotations, 1957–1987 (Scarecrow).
- Jussawalla, Feroza, ed. (1997) Conversations with V.S. Naipaul (University Press of Mississippi).
- Kelly, Richard (1989) V.S. Naipaul (Continuum).
- Khan, Akhtar Jamal (1998) V.S. Naipaul: A Critical Study (Creative Books)
- King, Bruce (1993) V.S. Naipaul (Macmillan).
- King, Bruce (2003) V.S. Naipaul, 2nd ed (Macmillan)
- Kramer, Jane (13 April 1980) From the Third World, an assessment of Naipaul's work in the New York Times Book Review.
- Levy, Judith (1995) V.S. Naipaul: Displacement and Autobiography (Garland).
- Nightingale, Peggy (1987) Journey through Darkness: The Writing of V.S. Naipaul (University of Queensland Press).
- Said, Edward (1986) Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World (Salmagundi).
- Theroux, Paul (1998) Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents (Houghton Mifflin).
- Theroux, Paul (1972). V.S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work (Deutsch).
- Weiss, Timothy F (1992) On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S. Naipaul (University of Massachusetts Press).
[edit] References
- ^ Coetzee, J. M (2001), New York Review of Books. Quote: "Naipaul is a master of English prose, and the prose of Half a Life is as clean and cold as a knife."
- ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001". Nobel Prize. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/.
- ^ Edward W. Said (1 March 2002). "Edward Said on Naipaul". http://web.archive.org/web/20071010132752/http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/caribbean/naipaul/said.html.
- ^ Didion, Joan (12 June 1980). "Without Regret or Hope". New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/7366.
- ^ Jonathan Gharraie (15 June 2008). "Naipaul's Darkness". http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/naipaul’s-darkness.
- ^ Reynolds, Nigel (27 March 2008). "Sir Vidia Naipaul admits his cruelty may have killed wife". The Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1582389/Sir-Vidia-Naipaul-admits-his-cruelty-may-have-killed-wife.html.
- ^ French, Patrick (22 March 2008). "Sex, truth and Vidia: Patrick French's biography of VS Naipaul". The Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3672030/Sex-truth-and-Vidia-Patrick-Frenchs-biography-of-VS-Naipaul.html. Retrieved 22 July 2009.
- ^ Balbir K. Punj (21 January 2003). "There was life before Islam". The Asian Age. http://www.hvk.org/articles/0103/315.html.
- ^ indianexpress.com/news/
[edit] External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: V. S. Naipaul |
- Naipaul Nobel Prize Lecture
- V. S. Naipaul at the Open Directory Project
- Editing Vidia, by Diana Athill, a memoir of Naipaul by his editor
- A literary Brown Sahib
- Works by or about V. S. Naipaul in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
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