V. S. Naipaul Information
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, TC (born 17 August 1932) is a Trinidadian-British writer. Best known for his novels focusing on postcolonial themes, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.[1] He has been called "a master of modern English prose."[2] 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), the Jerusalem Prize (1983) and the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature (1993).
In 2008, The Times ranked Naipaul seventh on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[3]
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Personal life
Naipaul was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago. 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]
Political views
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 him 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 his book dealing with the influence of Islam on non-Arab Muslims, “Beyond Belief: Islamic excursions among the converted peoples”, Naipaul states the following about Islam:[10]
| “ | The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows to only one people – the Arabs, the original people of the Prophet – a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages and earth reverences. These sacred Arab places have to be the sacred places of all the converted peoples. Converted peoples have to strip themselves of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such a thing can be arrived at), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism. | ” |
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 Persians 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 novelist 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".[11] 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:[12]
| “ | 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 mentioned some negative aspects of Islam in his works, such as nihilism among fundamentalists.[citation needed] He has been quoted describing the bringing down 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 bitingly condemned Pakistan in Among the Believers.[citation needed]
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.[13]
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)
- The Mimic Men – (1967)
- A Flag on the Island – (1967)
- In a Free State – (1971): Booker prize
- 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)
- A Turn in the South (1989)
- India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)
- Homeless by Choice (1992, with R. Jhabvala and Salman Rushdie)
- 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)
- Reading & Writing: A Personal Account (2000)
- The Writer and the World: Essays – (2002)
- Literary Occasions: Essays (2003, by Pankaj Mishra)
- A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (2007)
- The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010)[14]
Further reading
- Schutte, Gillian (2010) Behind Sir Vidia’s Masque: The Night the Naipauls Came to Supper (Book Southern Africa).
- 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).
References
- ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001". Nobel Prize. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/.
- ^ 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 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Times (London). 5 January 2008. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3127837.ece. Retrieved 1 February 2010.
- ^ Reynolds, Nigel (27 March 2008). "Sir Vidia Naipaul admits his cruelty may have killed wife". The Daily Telegraph (London). 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 (London). 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/
- ^ [1]
- ^ Wheatcroft, Geoffrey (4 August 2001). "V S Naipaul: Scourge of the liberals". The Independent (London). http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/v-s-naipaul-scourge-of-the-liberals-664440.html. Retrieved 27 May 2010.
- ^ Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, V. S. Naipaul, Pan Macmillan, 2010, p. 72
- ^ Edward W. Said (1 March 2002). "Edward Said on Naipaul". Archived from the original on 10 October 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20071010132752/http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/caribbean/naipaul/said.html. Retrieved 10 October 2008.
- ^ 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. Retrieved 26 January 2009.
- ^ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307270734
External links
| Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: V. S. Naipaul |
- Naipaul Nobel Prize Lecture
- Jonathan Rosen, Tarun Tejpal (Fall 1998). "V. S. Naipaul, The Art of Fiction No. 154". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1069/the-art-of-fiction-no-154-v-s-naipaul.
- 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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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Naipaul, V. S. |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | 17 August 1932 |
| Place of birth | Chaguanas, Trinidad |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
Categories: 1932 births | Alumni of University College, Oxford | Booker Prize winners | British novelists | British travel writers | British Nobel laureates | Honorary Fellows of University College, Oxford | Trinidad and Tobago people of Indian descent | Knights Bachelor | Living people | Nobel laureates in Literature | Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature | Postcolonial literature | Trinidad and Tobago Hindus | Trinidad and Tobago Nobel laureates | Trinidad and Tobago novelists | Trinidad and Tobago journalists | Trinidad and Tobago writers | David Cohen Prize recipients | Wesleyan University faculty | West Indian Nobel laureates | Trinidad and Tobago immigrants to the United Kingdom | British people of Indo-Trinidadian descent
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Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (born 17 August 1932) is a British writer who was born and raised in Trinidad. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.