The writer VS Naipaul, who explored questions of place and identity for more than half a century, has died aged 85. Turning from the comedy that began his career, Naipaul cast a steely eye on the shards of empire in a series of novels and travelogues. Unflattering portraits of the West Indies, India, Africa and the Islamic faith brought both hostility and acclaim. Critics accused him of holding people of the developing world in contempt even as his diamantine prose won him a series of awards including the Booker prize in 1971, a knighthood in 1989 and the Nobel prize for literature in 2001. Lady Nadira Naipaul confirmed that her husband had died peacefully in London. “He was a giant in all that he achieved and he died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour,” she said. Author Sir Salman Rushdie paid tribute to Naipaul, writing: “We disagreed all our lives, about politics, about literature, and I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother. RIP Vidia.” Mail on Sunday editor and friend Geordie Greig told BBC Radio 4 that he was at Naipaul’s bedside when he died. “Nadira talked about a poem by Lord Tennyson, Crossing the Bar, which had great resonance and meaning to him and I just turned on my phone and found it and we read it.” He added: “He drifted off and it was peaceful and very sad but what a life, what an achievement, what a legacy.” Naipaul was born in 1932 to a family that had arrived in Trinidad from India in the 1880s, part of what he once called “an immigrant Asian community in a small plantation island in the New World”. It was a community where he never felt at home, in 2008 recalling his childhood as “pretty awful” and his family as “terrible … very large, with too many people. There was no beauty. It was full of malice.” A government scholarship offered him a chance to escape, an immigrant once more as he travelled to Oxford in 1950 to study English. Having dreamed of a literary career since the age of 10, he hoped to “find out his material and miraculously become a writer” while studying for his “worthless degree”, but instead found only “solitude and despair”, as he told the Paris Review in 1998. “I was far too well prepared for it. I was far more intelligent than most of the people in my college or in my course.” Meanwhile Naipaul struggled to convert his ambitions into anything concrete, abandoning two novels as he graduated and began working at the BBC World Service, editing and presenting on the weekly Caribbean Voices slot. Sitting in the freelancers’ room at the broadcaster’s Langham House, a memory of a neighbour in Port of Spain rose up, and he began writing a story: “Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, ‘What happening there, Bogart?’” He sat there at the typewriter as a story of a man living on a run-down street seemed to write itself, not daring to leave the room until he had finished. The next day he wrote another, and then another until in six weeks he had an entire collection of colourful stories. Unwilling to take a chance on short stories from an unknown writer, André Deutsch encouraged him to write a novel, The Mystic Masseur, which was published in 1957. But even as his debut novel won the Jonathan Llewellyn Rhys prize, Naipaul was already turning his back on the light comedy that characterised his first three books. Casting around in desperation for a subject, he began telling the story of a man modelled on his father Seepersad, a journalist and aspiring writer who suffered a breakdown in 1933 and died 20 years later. A House for Mr Biswas charts the setbacks and indignities suffered by a man born to Indian parents in rural Trinidad, his struggles with his wife’s overbearing family and his search for a place he can call his own. Reviewing it for the Observer in 1961, Colin MacInnes marvelled at how Naipaul achieved the “splendid contradiction” of a work that was sad, at times horrific and terrifying, but “also funny, even hilarious”, and hailed a voice that “even when scornful or ironical, can be as tender, just, kind, delicate, filled with unassuming pity”. For Amitav Ghosh, writing in 2001, it was the last time Naipaul would “look at life outside the west on its own terms”. “After this,” Ghosh argued, “the richly textured islands of his early work would disappear, to be replaced by a series of largely interchangeable caricatures of societies depicted as ‘half-made’ in comparison with Europe.” Having exhausted the experience of his upbringing, Naipaul felt the need to move on. Invited in 1960 by the government of Trinidad and Tobago to visit the islands at their expense, Naipaul spent five months travelling through the West Indies and published an account of his voyage two years later. But The Middle Passage was not the hymn to a vibrant country on the cusp of independence that prime minister Eric Williams might have expected. Naipaul set the tone in an opening line that described his departure on the boat-train from Waterloo with “such a crowd of immigrant-type West Indians” that he was “glad … [to be] travelling first class”. He journeys through Trinidad, British Guiana, Surinam, Jamaica and Martinique, but is wearied by what he finds, seeing every day “the same things – unemployment, ugliness, overpopulation, race”. “History is built around achievement and creation,” he writes, “and nothing was created in the West Indies.” Critics in New York and London hailed Naipaul’s “ironical exposition and resigned analysis”, saluting a tone that they described as “critical but humane”, his “inevitable indignation” tempered with “an admirable sense of comedy”. But while the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott found Naipaul’s writing brilliant, he was doubtful about the results of an account seen through “Victorian spectacles”. “Everything is made to seem touching and ridiculous,” he wrote. “The people he encounters have an antic, desperate pathos. More often they are vulgar and we can imagine Mr Naipaul recoiling in terror from their exuberance.” For the next four decades Naipaul explored the legacy of colonialism, gathering a series of awards as he shifted between fiction and non-fiction. He won the WH Smith award in 1968 with a novel of a West Indian politician exiled in London, The Mimic Men, and the Booker prize in 1971 with a dark symphony of alienation, In a Free State. Awarding him the Nobel prize for literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised him for “having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”. Meanwhile he offered gloomy portraits of India, Africa and Islam in a series of travelogues including 1964’s An Area of Darkness, 1980’s A Congo Diary and 1981’s Among the Believers. For critics such as Edward Said, Naipaul became “a witness for the western prosecution”, making the case that “we ‘non-whites’ are the cause of all our problems”. Not only was he “not interested in the third world at all”, Said argued, but his accounts were “ignorant, illiterate, and cliche-ridden … Naipaul’s account of the Islamic, Latin American, African, Indian and Caribbean worlds totally ignores a massive infusion of critical scholarship about those regions in favour of the tritest, cheapest and the easiest of colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies”. Naipaul was never afraid of controversy, comparing the “calamitous effect” of Islam to colonialism in 2001 and suggesting a decade later that “within a paragraph or two” he could tell if a piece of writing “is by a woman or not”. A dispute with Paul Theroux that began in 1996 lasted for 15 years before Ian McEwan brokered a rapprochement at the Hay festival. Naipaul’s long-running feud with Walcott proved less tractable, reaching its nadir with the poet’s 2008 attack on his fellow Nobel laureate: “I have been bitten, I must avoid infection / Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.” His reputation suffered after announcing to the New Yorker in 1994 that he had been “a great prostitute man” during his marriage to Patricia Hale, and declined further in 2008 after admitting to his biographer Patrick French a long-running affair with Margaret Gooding in which he was “very violent”. But Naipaul professed to be unconcerned by criticism of his work, as he explained to the Observer in 2008. “When I read those things, I am immensely amused,” he said. “They don’t wound me at all.”<doc-sep>BRITISH author V.S. Naipaul has died at his home in London aged 85, his family said in a statement. The Trinidad-born Naipaul won the 2001 Nobel Prize for literature and his work includes novels, short stories and travel writing. 2 VS Naipaul has died peacefully at the age of 85 Credit: Corbis - Getty Lady Naipaul confirmed that her husband died peacefully. "He was a giant in all that he achieved and he died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour," she said Naipaul made his his name with the 1961 novel A House for Mr Biswas, which took three years to write. It describes Trinidad in the 1930s-50s from the perspective of an Indian immigrant, modelled on his father. Philip Roth dead – American Pastoral author who won the Pulitzer Prize dies aged 85 2 Sir VS Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature as well as the Booker Prize Credit: PA:Press Association His first book, The Mystic Masseur, was published in 1951 and he also won the 1971 Booker Prize for his novel In a Free State. Sir Vidia, who was born in rural Trinidad in 1932, and his love of literature was ignited by being read Dickens by his father as a child. MOST READ IN NEWS 'GOBSMACKED' Queen 'gave Harry OK for Oprah series after misleading pitch about soldiers' ROD LIDDLE Ousting right-on National Trust boss is a victory against wokery DRUMMER DEAD School Of Rock star dies at 32 after being hit by car as Jack Black mourns HOUSE ABOUT IT You won't believe what this ordinary London home looks like on the inside Exclusive TOM'S LEGACY Captain Tom Moore — who raised £39m for charity — left family £73k in will JABS HOPE Scientists 'crack cause of blood clots linked to Covid jabs & know how to fix it' He attended Oxford University in 1950 after winning a government scholarship allowing him to study at any university he wanted. Naipaul struggled with depression and attempted suicide while at university. We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368 . We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.'<doc-sep>
Written when he was not yet 30, the book cemented Mr. Naipaul’s standing among the most important writers of his generation; writing in The Times in 1971, Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist and later a fellow Nobel laureate, called it “magnificent.” It was eventually published by the Modern Library of 20th-century classics. Image Mr. Naipaul’s autobiographical fourth novel, published in 1961 and written before he was 30, cemented his standing among the most important writers of his generation. In 1955 Mr. Naipaul married Patricia Hale, an Englishwoman he had met at Oxford. The two were extremely close — she read all his work in progress — but their relationship was puzzling to outsiders, many of whom saw her as self-effacing and subservient. Although she often traveled with Mr. Naipaul, Ms. Hale is mentioned only once in his books, and not by name. The couple never had children. His childlessness, he told The New Yorker in 1994, “really comes from a detestation of the squalling background of children that I grew up with in my extended family.” He also confessed that he had been “a great prostitute man” in the early years of his marriage and acknowledged that in the 1970s he had fallen in love with an Anglo-Argentine woman who became his longtime mistress. After Ms. Hale died of cancer in 1996, Mr. Naipaul dedicated a new edition of “A House for Mr. Biswas” to her memory. ‘To Explore the World’ Mr. Naipaul began writing nonfiction in the 1960s. “I thought nonfiction gave one a sense to explore the world, the other world, the world one didn’t know fully,” he said in 2005. “I thought if I didn’t have this resource of nonfiction I would have dried up perhaps. I’d have come to the end of my material.” For his first nonfiction book, “The Middle Passage” (1962), Mr. Naipaul returned to the West Indies. He charted inter-island racial tensions in Trinidad; analyzed the cultural “mimicry” he saw as central to colonial identity; questioned how the region, then on the brink of self-rule, would govern itself; and observed that the smaller Caribbean islands “in the name of tourism, are selling themselves into a new slavery.” Some found his portrayal distasteful. Derek Walcott, the Caribbean-born poet and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, called him “V. S. Nightfall” in a poem, and said his prose was scarred by his “repulsion towards Negroes” and the “self-disfiguring sneer that is praised for its probity.” Yet Walcott was pleased when Mr. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize. “It will mean something for the region,” he told The Guardian. In 1964 Mr. Naipaul published the first of three travelogues about India, “An Area of Darkness.” He found that in spite of his Indian origins, he did not belong there at all.