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Novelist Sir VS Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize in literature, has died at his home in London aged 85, his family have said.

Sir Vidia, who was born in rural Trinidad in 1932, was known for works including A Bend in the River and his masterpiece, A House for Mr Biswas.

The author, who wrote more than 30 books, won the Booker Prize in 1971 and the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001.

His wife Lady Naipaul called him a "giant in all that he achieved".

She said he died "surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour".

On social media, people have paid tribute to the author and expressed their sadness.

"No-one inspired me to read more than Naipaul," one person wrote while another said: "His novel A House for Mr Biswas has stayed with me as a lasting memory for 30+ years."

Sir Vidia, who as a child was read Shakespeare and Dickens by his father, was raised a Hindu and attended Queen's Royal College.

He moved to Britain and enrolled at Oxford University in 1950 after winning a government scholarship giving him entry into any Commonwealth university of his choosing.

Sir Vidia with his wife, Nadira, in 2013Image copyright Nick Harvey
Image caption Sir Vidia with his second wife, Nadira, in 2013

As a student, he struggled with depression and attempted suicide.

His first book, The Mystic Masseur, was published in 1951 and a decade later he published his most celebrated novel, A House for Mr Biswas, which took over three years to write.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for "having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories".

His first wife, Patricia Hale, died in 1996 and he went on to marry Pakistani journalist, Nadira.

Sir Vidia was outspoken and is known for criticisms of Tony Blair - who he described as a "pirate" - as well as Charles Dickens and EM Forster.

He also fell out with the American travel writer Paul Theroux, who he had mentored, in a bitter 15-year feud after Theroux discovered a book he had given Naipaul in a second-hand bookshop. They later reunited.

 

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The British author VS Naipaul has died at his home in London aged 85, his family said in a statement. 

Lady Naipaul said: "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."

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in Trinidad, publishing more than 30 books ranging from comic novels set in his homeland to memoir and travel writing.  

He moved to Britain to study at Oxford in 1950 after winning a government scholarship to study at any Commonwealth university in the world.

He was knighted by the Queen in 1990 for a career distinguished by extravagant critical praise for works such as A Bend in the River and A House for Mr Biswas.

Naipaul in 1968
Naipaul in 1968 Credit: John Minihan/Getty Images

He was awarded the 1971 Booker Prize for his novel In a Free State and in 2001 won the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

Yet his approach to detailing life in former British colonies split audiences. While to many readers in Britain and the US he offered a way into reading about African or Caribbean nations, he generated hostility among people who thought he had left them behind. 

As Edward Said,  a former professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, once put it, although Naipaul, in the West is seen as "a master novelist and an important witness to the disintegration and hypocrisy of the third world, in the postcolonial world he's a marked man as a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him - though that doesn't exclude people thinking he's a gifted writer."

 

Fans of his writing also had to reconcile his elegant prose with a complex private life when it emerged he kept a mistress for 24 years before leaving his first wife.

He later admitted that his mental cruelty to Patricia Naipaul may even have killed her.

"I think that consumed her. I think she had all the relapses and everything after that," he said in a 2001 biography.

"She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way."

In later life, he also became embroiled in a bad-tempered  literary feud with Paul Theroux. Their friendship was shattered in 1996 when Naipaul offered personally-signed and dedicated copies of Theroux's books for auction.

www.telegraph.co.uk/books/news...naipaul-dies-age-85/

 

Sunil
Last edited by Sunil

V.S. Naipaul, Delver of Colonialism Through Unsparing Books, Dies at 85

The author V. S. Naipaul in 1991. He was compared to Conrad, Dickens and Tolstoy, but was also a lightning rod for criticism.CreditNeal Boenzi/The New York Times

V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel laureate who documented the migrations of peoples, the unraveling of the British Empire, the ironies of exile and the clash between belief and unbelief in 14 often unsparing novels and as many works of nonfiction, died on Saturday in London. He was 85.

The Associated Press, citing a statement from his family, said Mr. Naipaul died at his home.

His wife, Nadira Naipaul, told The A.P. that 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 endeavor.”

In many ways embodying the contradictions of the postcolonial world, Mr. Naipaul was born of Indian ancestry in Trinidad, went to Oxford University on a scholarship and lived the rest of his life in England, where he forged one of the most illustrious literary careers of the last half century. He was knighted in 1990.

Compared in his lifetime to Conrad, Dickens and Tolstoy, he was also a lightning rod for criticism, particularly by those who read his portrayals of third-world disarray as apologies for colonialism.

Yet Mr. Naipaul exempted neither colonizer nor colonized from his scrutiny. He wrote of the arrogance and self-aggrandizement of the colonizers, yet exposed the self-deception and ethical ambiguities of the liberation movements that swept across Africa and the Caribbean in their wake. He brought to his work moral urgency and a novelist’s attentiveness to individual lives and triumphs.

Mr. Naipaul personified a sense of displacement. Having left behind the circumscribed world of Trinidad, he was never entirely rooted in England. In awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy described him as “a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice.”

Mr. Naipaul in 2001, the year he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

Yet his existential homelessness was as much willed as fated. Although he spent his literary career mining his origins, Mr. Naipaul fiercely resisted the idea of being tethered to a hyphen, or to a particular ethnic or religious identity. He once left a publisher when he saw himself listed in the catalog as a “West Indian novelist.” A Hindu, though not observant, Mr. Naipaul was a staunch defender of Western civilization. His guiding philosophy was universalism.

“What do they call it? Multi-culti? It’s all absurd, you know,” he said in 2004. “I think if a man picks himself up and comes to another country he must meet it halfway.” It was the kind of provocative statement that won him both enemies and admirers over the years.

An often difficult man with a fierce temper who dressed sedately in tweed jackets, Mr. Naipaul had a face of hawklike severity. “After one look from him, I could skip Yom Kippur,” Saul Bellow once joked. If displeased by questions, Mr. Naipaul would sometimes walk out on public appearances and hang up on journalists. Although he could be mischievous and had a deep sense of humor, he was prone to melancholy.

Mr. Naipaul practiced yoga until his back grew too weak, and often lamented that writing took a physical toll. He would spend months cogitating at home in London or more often in his book-filled cottage in the Wiltshire countryside, outside Salisbury, which he shared with his first wife and later his second, and with a black-and-white cat named Augustus.

He continued to write novels even after declaring the form a 19th-century relic, no longer able to capture the complexities of the contemporary world. Yet his fiction was always in conversation with his nonfiction; each new book built on the ones that came before. Mr. Naipaul wrote relatively slowly, sometimes only a paragraph a day, and was intensely protective of his work. Diana Athill, who edited 19 of his books at the London publisher Andre Deutsch between the 1950s and the â€ē70s, said editing Mr. Naipaul involved providing him with much reassurance.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born on Aug. 17, 1932, in Chaguanas, Trinidad, where his paternal grandfather had emigrated from India in the 1880s as an indentured servant to work on the sugar plantations. His father, Seepersad, was a newspaper reporter for The Trinidad Guardian and an aspiring fiction writer who as a child was luckily allowed to go to school; his older brother was sent to work in the cane fields for eight cents a day and his sister remained illiterate. His mother, Droapatie Capildeo, [ was from a large, prosperous family, and when Mr. Naipaul was 6 the family moved in with them in a big house in Port of Spain.

The second of seven children, he was particularly close to his older sister, Kamla. His younger and only brother, Shiva, who was also a novelist, died in 1985.

This obituary will continue to be updated.

FM

VS Naipaul is one of my favorite writers. We spent a morning together in Guyana in December 1990. I have three photos of the encounter. One shows him autographing my copy of A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS. Every August 17 for nearly 40 years I have marked his birthday in various ways, including starting a thread in this forum. For me he was a master craftsman who wrote better English than many Englishmen. I have a number of his books in my home library.

FM
Last edited by Former Member
Drugb posted:
Mr.T posted:

He did write some rubbish about the arrival of Indians, and their position in Surinamese society some years ago. We ended up in an argument on a Triny forum.

Imagine a jackass like you putting yourself up against a literary giant like VS. 

Literary faint or not, he shouldn't write lies about things he has no idea about. When I presented him with the correct historical facts he suddenly changed his tune. That wife beater should have been reported from the UK long time ago.

Mr.T
Mr.T posted:
Drugb posted:
Mr.T posted:

He did write some rubbish about the arrival of Indians, and their position in Surinamese society some years ago. We ended up in an argument on a Triny forum.

Imagine a jackass like you putting yourself up against a literary giant like VS. 

Literary faint or not, he shouldn't write lies about things he has no idea about. When I presented him with the correct historical facts he suddenly changed his tune. That wife beater should have been reported from the UK long time ago.

Naipaul was a wife beater?

I was surprised that SN reported that he suffered from depression an attempted suicide...

V
VishMahabir posted:
Mr.T posted:
Drugb posted:
Mr.T posted:

He did write some rubbish about the arrival of Indians, and their position in Surinamese society some years ago. We ended up in an argument on a Triny forum.

Imagine a jackass like you putting yourself up against a literary giant like VS. 

Literary faint or not, he shouldn't write lies about things he has no idea about. When I presented him with the correct historical facts he suddenly changed his tune. That wife beater should have been reported from the UK long time ago.

Naipaul was a wife beater?

I was surprised that SN reported that he suffered from depression an attempted suicide...

Hey Mudhead, I am not surprised you can't google. 

Mitwah
Leonora posted:

Hey Mits, Naipaul had nice Brahmin names but he spat too much on India, read this:

http://www.postcolonialweb.org...n/naipaul/meena.html

 

Meena Kandasamy sounds like a chamar. She accuses Naipaul of spitting on Indians but she herself spat on Brahmins throughout her article. In fact every day millions of chamars spit on Brahmins in India. And Meena doesn't seem to want a proposed revival of the KAMA SUTRA, that wonderful sex manual that has withstood the test of time. 

Naipaul wasn't perfect. He had striking personal character flaws. But his writing was superb and earned him prestigious prizes deservedly. The Nobel Prize wasn't given to him for spitting on India but for making a contribution to world literature. Naturally, originating from tiny Trinidad, Naipaul's literary achievements would arouse jealousy, envy, malice and calumny in many quarters. So be it.

FM
Labba posted:
Mitwah posted:
Leonora posted:

Hey Mits, Naipaul had nice Brahmin names but he spat too much on India, read this:

http://www.postcolonialweb.org...n/naipaul/meena.html

 

Like Yugli, His brahmin origin, Naipaul wrote in 1984 (Finding the Center), gave him a caste certainty, a high sense of the self.

Mr Naipaul was no balahoo Brahmin. Hey hey hey...

That could be so, since Yugli doesn't have a high sense of the self

Mitwah
Django posted:
Vish M posted:

Seems as though there is no decency on this forum, a tribute to anyone who passed on is always whatever is positive.

It is a practice many on this forum cannot comprehend

They just spill their "Trash" as opinion

Oye Vish,the good and bad are revealed when some one passed on.

Vish must be a Brahmin too.

Mitwah
Baseman posted:
Mr.T posted:
Prashad posted:

Naipaul experienced both white and black racism but he never let it keep him down.

Naipaul hated black and white people, and his books don't make any attempt to hide that. He hated the colonial master so much that he went to live in the UK.

Mr T, are you in a permanent state of PMS?

Talk about a DUMMY writing ABSOLUTE BULL CRAP!! What an ASS!!!

Nehru
Gilbakka posted:
Leonora posted:

Hey Mits, Naipaul had nice Brahmin names but he spat too much on India, read this:

http://www.postcolonialweb.org...n/naipaul/meena.html

 

Meena Kandasamy sounds like a chamar. She accuses Naipaul of spitting on Indians but she herself spat on Brahmins throughout her article. In fact every day millions of chamars spit on Brahmins in India. And Meena doesn't seem to want a proposed revival of the KAMA SUTRA, that wonderful sex manual that has withstood the test of time. 

Naipaul wasn't perfect. He had striking personal character flaws. But his writing was superb and earned him prestigious prizes deservedly. The Nobel Prize wasn't given to him for spitting on India but for making a contribution to world literature. Naturally, originating from tiny Trinidad, Naipaul's literary achievements would arouse jealousy, envy, malice and calumny in many quarters. So be it.

Naipaul acted as thought there was no colonial context to character and dispositions of the colonies so levy heavy contempt on the culture of peoples there as being backward and substandard on account of their own choosing. This has brought recriminations from those like Edward Said and Walcott among others. It does not mean he was not a great writer but his blindness in areas was cavernous. Much of the analysis of his work takes it in context of  post colonial works but given his position this leads to mistaken conclusions. It is therefore difficult to rank his work as  satire, or wide ranging social commentary. This is Naipaul's own peculiarity and not a product of malice from his contemporaneous.  And this pertains to his works specifically. As a man there were also profound lack of social graces and an almost complete lack of empathy for ones who cared for him. He was a peculiar fellow despite his exceptional literary gifts.

FM
D2 posted:
Gilbakka posted:
Leonora posted:

Hey Mits, Naipaul had nice Brahmin names but he spat too much on India, read this:

http://www.postcolonialweb.org...n/naipaul/meena.html

 

Meena Kandasamy sounds like a chamar. She accuses Naipaul of spitting on Indians but she herself spat on Brahmins throughout her article. In fact every day millions of chamars spit on Brahmins in India. And Meena doesn't seem to want a proposed revival of the KAMA SUTRA, that wonderful sex manual that has withstood the test of time. 

Naipaul wasn't perfect. He had striking personal character flaws. But his writing was superb and earned him prestigious prizes deservedly. The Nobel Prize wasn't given to him for spitting on India but for making a contribution to world literature. Naturally, originating from tiny Trinidad, Naipaul's literary achievements would arouse jealousy, envy, malice and calumny in many quarters. So be it.

Naipaul acted as thought there was no colonial context to character and dispositions of the colonies so levy heavy contempt on the culture of peoples there as being backward and substandard on account of their own choosing. This has brought recriminations from those like Edward Said and Walcott among others. It does not mean he was not a great writer but his blindness in areas was cavernous. Much of the analysis of his work takes it in context of  post colonial works but given his position this leads to mistaken conclusions. It is therefore difficult to rank his work as  satire, or wide ranging social commentary. This is Naipaul's own peculiarity and not a product of malice from his contemporaneous.  And this pertains to his works specifically. As a man there were also profound lack of social graces and an almost complete lack of empathy for ones who cared for him. He was a peculiar fellow despite his exceptional literary gifts.

I appreciate your viewpoint, D2.

FM
Nehru posted:

GILLY, DID YOU READ THE GUERILLA, THIS IS ONE i DID NOT READ.

I read these: 

1. The Mystic Masseur 

2. The Suffrage of Elvira 

3. Miguel Street 

4. A House for Mr Biswas 

5. In a Free State 

6. Guerrillas 

7. A Bend in the River 

8. The Enigma of Arrival 

9. A Way in the World 

10. Half a Life 

11. The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book 

12. Magic Seeds 

13. The Middle Passage 

14. An Area of Darkness 

15. The Loss of  El Dorado 

16. The Overcrowded Barracoon 

17. India: A Wounded Civilization 

18. The Return of Eva Peron 

19. Among the Believers 

20. Finding the Centre 

21. A Turn in the South

22. India: A Million Mutinies Now 

23. Beyond Belief 

24. A Writer's People

25. The Masque of Africa 

26. Between Father and Son 

27. The Writer and the World 

 

FM
Gilbakka posted:
Nehru posted:

GILLY, DID YOU READ THE GUERILLA, THIS IS ONE i DID NOT READ.

I read these: 

1. The Mystic Masseur 

2. The Suffrage of Elvira 

3. Miguel Street 

4. A House for Mr Biswas 

5. In a Free State 

6. Guerrillas 

7. A Bend in the River 

8. The Enigma of Arrival 

9. A Way in the World 

10. Half a Life 

11. The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book 

12. Magic Seeds 

13. The Middle Passage 

14. An Area of Darkness 

15. The Loss of  El Dorado 

16. The Overcrowded Barracoon 

17. India: A Wounded Civilization 

18. The Return of Eva Peron 

19. Among the Believers 

20. Finding the Centre 

21. A Turn in the South

22. India: A Million Mutinies Now 

23. Beyond Belief 

24. A Writer's People

25. The Masque of Africa 

26. Between Father and Son 

27. The Writer and the World 

 

The only Naipaul book I ever read was Miguel Street. I started Guerilla but never finished it.

GTAngler

Thank you Gilly. I only read 6 of those, I will try to make time for more.  " A bend in the River" iis the best Book I ever read and I read hundreds of Playboy

 

Seriously that book made me feel part of the character, made me visualized places and situations  as if I am aware of the plot and locations.

God Bless the brother with writing skills unmatched by anyone.

Nehru
Nehru posted:

Thank you Gilly. I only read 6 of those, I will try to make time for more.  " A bend in the River" iis the best Book I ever read and I read hundreds of Playboy

 

Seriously that book made me feel part of the character, made me visualized places and situations  as if I am aware of the plot and locations.

God Bless the brother with writing skills unmatched by anyone.

"Guerrillas" is about the infamous Michael X aka Michael De Freitas aka Michael Abdul Malick and the Englishwoman Gail Benson whom he murdered in Trinidad.

FM

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