VS Naipaul was a writer with no fixed roots. (Source: Wikimedia Commons) VS Naipaul was a writer with no fixed roots. (Source: Wikimedia Commons) His politics, behaviour and judgment were often suspect, but it’s difficult to fault VS Naipaul’s writing. The Nobel Laureate passed away on Saturday (August 11) at the of 85. Known for his acerbic, scathing remarks, Naipaul faced both admiration and contempt from his fellow peers. Naipaul was a writer with no fixed roots. He was a Trinidadian by birth, an Indian by descent and in terms of citizenship he was British. Through his writings, he attempted to re-visit each of these places, but much like everything else, they did not escape his bitter criticism. He did not like the places anymore. Several of his books are based in post-colonial societies and through his writing, he investigates the quotidian life and also presents a gloomy picture of the world they reside in. He had also not tried to hide his skepticism regarding revolution and social upheavals at a time when people were ushering in the age without the dominant rule of the empire. In his book, India: A Million Mutinies Now, the Nobel Laureate wrote about how Independence affected people in India. “Independence was worked for by people more or less at the top; the freedom it brought has worked its way down. People everywhere have ideas now of who they are and what they owe themselves. The process quickened with the economic development that came after independence; what was hidden in 1962, or not easy to see, what perhaps was only in a state of becoming, has become clearer. The liberation of spirit that has come to India could not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to come as disturbance. It had to come as rage and revolt. India was now a country of a million little mutinies.” Naipaul’s writing can both infuriate and dazzle, but it is difficult to not acknowledge his brilliance. Here are some of his most celebrated works. A House for Mr Biswas A House for Mr Biswas remains one of Naipaul’s most endearing work. (Source: Amazon.in) A House for Mr Biswas remains one of Naipaul’s most endearing work. (Source: Amazon.in) Published in 1961, A House for Mr Biswas is one of Naipaul’s most enduring works and one that catapulted him to worldwide fame. The novel narrates the compelling story of an Indo-Trinidadian, Mohun Biswas, his struggle to gain success, to find a house of his own and the failure he meets with. Through the life of the protagonist, Naipaul trains his lens to see a colonial world that by them had ceased to exist. Guerrillas The island in Guerrillas, though unnamed, closely resembles Naipaul’s own birthplace. The island in Guerrillas, though unnamed, closely resembles Naipaul’s own birthplace. This 1975 novel is situated in a Caribbean island filled with people with different ethnicities but ruled by the post-colonial British. Although the name of the island is never mentioned, it is situated in familiar ground. It is an island Naipaul has written about over and over again, one that closely resembles his own birthplace. Paul Theroux in New York Times Book Review described Guerrillas as “one of Naipaul’s most complex books”, “a violent book in which little violence is explicit; and it is the opposite of anonymous.” Theroux then went to write that this might startle Naipaul’s readers “It may surprise the casual readers of Naipaul’s work, those who regret the absence of calypso in his West Indian books,” he wrote. The Middle Passage The Middle Passage marked Naipaul’s initiation into the genre of travel writing. The Middle Passage marked Naipaul’s initiation into the genre of travel writing. This 1962 travelogue was born out of his return to the Caribbean after Naipaul received fellowship from the Government of Trinidad and Tobago. The book documents his experiences in five Caribbean territories and also records his commentary on slavery, the role South Asian immigrants played in the various countries, and also dealt with the question of culture, race and colonialism. The book served as a important role in his literary career as it marked his initiation into the genre of travel writing. In a Free State Naipaul had won the Booker Prize for his 1971 novel, In A Free State. Naipaul had won the Booker Prize for his 1971 novel, In A Free State. The 1971 novel won Naipaul the Booker Prize and remains one of his most staggering work. It includes two stories which the author calls the “supporting narratives”, the eponymous novel, and the prologue and an epilogue borrowed from his own journals. These four narratives are bound by the common theme of displacement. A Bend in the River A Bend in the River published in 1979 remains one of Naipaul’s most celebrated works. A Bend in the River published in 1979 remains one of Naipaul’s most celebrated works. One of his most celebrated works, A Bend in the River was published in 1979. It narrates the tale of a unnamed merchant, Salim, who is posited in the post-colonial Africa and views the changes the place is going through with a detached perspective. The novel has been compared to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness owing to its depiction of Africa.<doc-sep>Sir VS Naipaul at the Literature Live festival at NCPA, Mumbai. (Express photo by Vasant Prabhu) Sir VS Naipaul at the Literature Live festival at NCPA, Mumbai. (Express photo by Vasant Prabhu) On fellow greats EM Forster: “People like EM Forster make a pretence of making poetry of the three religions. It’s false. It’s a pretence. It’s utter rubbish. It (A Passage to India) has only one real scene, and that’s the foolish little tea party at the beginning. I don’t think there is another real scene.” Ernest Hemingway: “Hemingway was so busy being an American that he didn’t know where he was.” Henry James: “The worst writer in the world.” Wole Soyinka: After hearing the news of his Nobel Prize win in 1986: “Has he written anything?” On women writers He famously said this about his publisher in a 2011 interview at the Royal Geographic Society: “My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.” He had this to say about Jane Austen, in the same interview: “I couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world… 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… because of a woman’s inherent sentimentality, the narrow view of the world… And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.” On places -If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris. -Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. -In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet. -Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don’t think that can be said of the Africa I travelled in. -In England people are very proud of being very stupid. -I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing. More of what he said -There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to. -I’m the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. -If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead. -I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands. -The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. War of words -Friendship and rift with Paul Theroux They met in Kampala, Uganda, in 1966, when Theroux, a travel writer, was teaching at the university. Naipaul took the American under his wing and though much of their association at the time was fuelled by Theroux’s hero worship of the older writer, it was a friendship that would last 31 years. But it was to come to an end in 1996, when Theroux discovered that Naipaul had offered personally signed copies of Theroux’s books up for auction. In 1998, the American published Sir Vidia’s Shadow, an account of their personal and professional relationship, and described Naipaul as a “mushy soul afflicted with a cruel streak”. The feud lasted 15 years and came to an end when at the 2011 Hay Literature Festival, UK, writer Ian McEwan encouraged them to shake hands and bury the hatchet. “VS Nightfall” and “The Mongoose” Fellow Caribbean Nobel Prize winner, the late Derek Walcott, had no time for Naipaul’s praise or criticism. In 2007, the Trinidad-born writer described Walcott as “a man whose talent has been all but strangled by his colonial setting”. In the same essay, Naipaul praised Walcott’s craft, writing: “Here, in the most unexpected, purest way, we had a poet, someone of startling vision and muscular expression.” So, the next year, Walcott read out “The Mongoose”, a rhyming diatribe taking pot-shots at Naipaul, at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica. Having already named his literary enemy “VS Nightfall” in an older poem, Walcott proceeded to read out his new offering which began thus: I must have been bitten/I must avoid infection/Or else I will be as dead/As Naipaul’s fiction.<doc-sep>In the second half of the 20th century, few writers were as praised or scorned as VS Naipaul, the Nobel-prize winning writer whose talent for styling prose was as great as his penchant for controversy. “If a writer doesn’t generate hostility,” Naipaul once said, “he is dead.” Born in Trinidad in the early 1930s, he penned comic masterpieces of island life before turning to the larger world, travelling from South America to Africa and Asia for richly detailed works on countries freed from colonial rule. He died at his home in London on Saturday. He was 85. Knighted in 1990, Naipaul faced accusations of racism, sexism, chauvinism and Islamophobia. He had long-running literary spats with Paul Theroux, a former protégé who lambasted Naipaul as “a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone”, and the poet Derek Walcott, his Caribbean peer who depicted Naipaul in a poem as “a rodent in old age”. Naipaul acknowledged frequenting prostitutes while married, physically abusing his mistress and treating his wife in such a way, he told biographer Patrick French, that “She suffered. It could be said that I had killed her.” Through it all, he expressed few regrets and maintained a prodigious output, publishing more than two dozen volumes that ranged from novels to travelogues to genre-bending works that mixed fiction with personal history. The writer pictured in 1973 (Getty) His books – such as realist novels A House for Mr Biswas (1961), A Bend in the River (1979) and the Man Booker prize-winning In a Free State (1971) – were considered works of a technical virtuoso, whom even Walcott hailed as “our finest writer of the English sentence”. With few exceptions, his sentences were knife-sharp, devoid of fuss or flair but often lyrical in their simplicity. Naipaul wrote Biswas, the book that vaulted him to acclaim, when he was in his 20s, after moving to England on a scholarship to the University of Oxford. The book’s central figure, Mohun Biswas, was based loosely on Naipaul’s father, a journalist with literary aspirations. “Six-fingered, and born in the wrong way”, Biswas seeks a home of his own, and the sense of security and personal freedom that property might offer. The story “was Dickensian in its scope and sympathy, yet wholly original”, cultural critic and screenwriter Stephen Schiff wrote in The New Yorker in 1994, with dozens of characters and settings that extended from the crowded streets of Trinidad’s capital to quiet sugar-cane plantations. Like Naipau’s three previous books, including his 1959 story collection Miguel Street, it mixed tragicomic moments – endless fights between Biswas and his in-laws – and scenes that seemed to capture the author’s private longing for stability and satisfaction. In one passage, Naipaul described the title character’s lingering memory of a late-afternoon bus ride: In the gloom, a boy was leaning against the hut, his hands behind him, staring at the road. He wore a vest and nothing more. The vest glowed white. In an instant the bus went by, noisy in the dark, through bush and level sugar-cane fields. Biswas could not remember where the hut stood, but the picture remained: a boy leaning against an earth house that had no reason for being there, under the dark falling sky, a boy who didn’t know where the road, and that bus, went. Naipaul was initially known as a gentle chronicler of West Indian life, seen by some critics as part of a group that included Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon, the Barbadian novelist George Lamming and Walcott, who was from Saint Lucia. After Biswas, however, Naipaul rarely wrote about his country with any warmth. Trinidad, Naipaul wrote in the 1962 travelogue The Middle Passage, was “unimportant, uncreative, cynical,” home to “a society which produced nothing, never had to prove its worth, and was never called upon to be efficient.” Naipaul later said that the book, named for a stage of the slave trade in which Africans were taken in bondage to the Americas, was “terribly flawed” and overly harsh in its criticism of Trinidad and its Caribbean neighbours. Still, it was a critical success, and engendered a succession of travels and travelogues. He visited India for three books, beginning with An Area of Darkness (1964), and travelled to the majority-Muslim countries of Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia for Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998). His travel writings were often anatomies of catastrophe, profiles of communities that Naipaul described as “half-made” or decaying, and peppered with disdain for the former colonisers and the recently decolonised Naipaul found escape by reading Molière, Aesop and Cyrano de Bergerac, authors whose fantastical creations he eschewed as a writer (Getty) (GETTY) To some critics, Naipaul offered what New Yorker writer Jane Kramer called “a topography of the void”, perceptive criticism of imperialism and oppression. To others, his work had a racist tinge. The literary critic Edward Said described Naipaul as “a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him”, and called out in particular his depiction of Islam as a rage-filled, imperialistic faith. Naipaul did little to comfort his critics. “Africans need to be kicked,” he once said, “that’s the only thing they understand.” When critic and writer Elizabeth Hardwick asked him in 1979 why some Indian women wear a red dot on their forehead, referring to the bindi, Naipaul said it signified that “my head is empty”. He described a “little imp” inside his soul, a mischievous spirit that not infrequently carried him away, and said he was proudest of his mature travel writing, not his novels, despite the criticism they sometimes drew. A 1975 journey to report on the Zaire (now Congo) of military ruler Mobutu Sese Seko led to A Bend in the River, a 280-page novel that recalled Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The book detailed the rise of an image-obsessed, Mobutu-like despot known as the Big Man, but began with a philosophical pronouncement: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” It was a cold view that Naipaul considered merely realistic, born from his travels and impoverished upbringing. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born to a Hindu family in Chaguanas, 30 years before the island and its smaller neighbour, Tobago, declared independence from Britain. His paternal grandfather came to Trinidad as an indentured servant from northern India, and his father was a reporter at the Trinidad Guardian. His mother came from a family of high-caste landowners that had lost much of its fortune. In French’s 2008 biography, The World Is What It Is, Naipaul said he was molested by a cousin for several years, beginning when he was six or seven years old. Naipaul also described perennial conflict between his parents and their families, which fuelled the plot of A House for Mr Biswas. He found escape by reading Molière, Aesop and Cyrano de Bergerac, authors whose fantastical creations he eschewed as a writer. Instead, he imitated the journalistic eye of his father. In his autobiographical novel A Way in the World (1994), he described entertaining himself as a teenager by “playing the newsreel back … trying to remember words, gestures and expressions in correct sequence, to arrive at an understanding of the people I had been with and the true meaning of what had been said”. After schooling in Trinidad’s capital, Port-of-Spain, he studied English at Oxford and graduated in 1953, months before his father died after a heart attack. Naipaul resisted pleas from his family to move home and instead bore down on his writing. His 1975 novel Guerrillas, set amid a Caribbean revolution, marked his commercial breakthrough in the United States. In his later works, he tended increasingly towards autobiography – in novels such as The Enigma of Arrival (1987), Half a Life (2001) and Magic Seeds (2004) – and towards journalism, in collections such as The Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad (1980). That book’s title essay, drawn from five magazine pieces about the political turbulence of 1970s Argentina, was considered one of his finest works of nonfiction.<doc-sep>
“The lives of writers,” said V.S. Naipaul in 1994, “are a legitimate subject of inquiry, and the truth should not be skimped.” So let’s not skimp. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, who died Saturday at his home in London six days before his 86th birthday, was “the greatest living writer in the English language.” So thought another V.S.—Pritchett—in 1980. His productivity was amazing: from his first book, a novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957), to his last, The Masques of Africa, a nonfiction work (2010), more than 30 volumes of fiction, essays, memoirs, and, for want of a more precise word, travel books. He was also selfish, petty, snobbish, jealous of other writers, and utterly lacking in personal loyalty. In support of all this, there was the treatment of his first wife, Patricia Hale, who read and edited all his manuscripts. When she was undergoing treatment for the breast cancer that would kill her within two years, Hale found out that Naipaul had frequented prostitutes—and found out by reading an interview he gave to The New Yorker. “It could be said that I killed her,” he said later, “I feel a little bit that way.” (To be fair, Naipaul rededicated a reprint of his third novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, to her.) After her death, the Nobel laureate was approached by Patrick French about a biography. Naipaul gave French Patricia’s diary, which was apparently unread by Naipaul himself. In French’s 2009 The World As it Is, he wrote that Hale’s diary “reveals more about the creation of [Naipaul's] subsequent books and her role in their creation, than any other source. It puts Patricia Naipaul on a par with other great, tragic, literary spouses such as Sonia Tolstoy, Jane Carlyle, and Leonard Woolf.” Naipaul also gave French a collection of letters from his longtime mistress, Margaret Murray. One wonders what Murray’s reaction was on learning from French' book that some of her letters were unopened. Regarding the breakup of the famous friendship between Naipaul and Paul Theroux, French says the American writer “failed to see that Naipaul had no loyalty to him.” Theroux might have gotten the message in 1997, after knowing Naipaul for 31 years, when he found books he had written and autographed to V.S. listed in an auction catalogue . Theroux got off easy. When Salman Rushdie was under sentence of death from the Ayatollah Khomeini, Naipaul declined to join writers from all over the world in Rushdie’s defense. “I don’t know his books,” he said, “but I’ve been aware of his statements. I find them usually left-wing and trivial and antiquated.” Khomeini’s fatwa, he quipped, was “an extreme form of literary criticism.” He didn’t regret the criticism he received for taking Khomeini’s side because “I was not interested, and I remain completely indifferent to how people think of me, because I was serving this thing called literature.” Well, la-de-da. By literature, Naipaul meant mostly 19th century writers such as Balzac, Dickens, and Tolstoy—though not Stendhal (“repetitive, tedious”) or Flaubert (“the greatest disappointment” he experienced reading Madame Bovary) As for the 20th century, forget about it. He routinely dismissed writers of greater imaginative gifts, including Garcia Marquez, Proust (“tedious” and “self-indulging”), and Joyce (he referred to Ulysses contemptuously as “the Irish book”). E.M. Forster was “a sodomite” and “an odious fraud.” The only post-19th century writers of whom he seemed to approve wholeheartedly were William Somerset Maugham and that consummate snob of 20th century English literature, Evelyn Waugh. (For his part, Waugh publicly praised some of Naipaul’s books, but in a 1963 letter to Nancy Mitford referred to him as “that clever little nigger Naipaul.”) “ Naipaul's vitriol was always reserved for institutions, not the individuals who lived under them. ” Though he was repeatedly praised as the successor to Joseph Conrad for being the interpreter of the emerging Third World, Naipaul insisted that Conrad “had no influence at all on me.” Oh yes, he did. If not for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Naipaul’s greatest novel, A Bend in the River (1979)—a book that turns Conrad inside out by showing the colonial experience from the perspective of the colonized—wouldn’t have been possible. In a famous essay on Conrad, Naipaul berated the Ukrainian-born novelist for an “imaginative deficiency as well as his philosophical need to stick as close as possible to the facts of every situation… he did not seek to discover; he sought only to explain.” Surely this indictment can be made of Naipaul’s fiction as well.