V. S. Naipaul

Trinidadian-born Indian writer

• Born: August 17, 1932
• Birthplace: Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago
• Died: August 11, 2018
• Place of death: London, England

Naipaul brought a new depth and seriousness to West Indian fiction at a time when postcolonial writing was developing into a discussion of social and individual disjunctions that emerged as a result of empire. His work, which included journalism, focused global attention on the lives of people of the developing world.

Early Life

V. S. Naipaul was the second child and first son of Seepersand Naipaul and Droapatie Capildeo, a family of Hindu Indians whose forbears had immigrated to Trinidad. At the time Naipaul was born, Trinidad was a Crown Colony, part of the British Empire. It acquired independence in 1962. Naipaul’s nuclear family changed houses often because of the whims of a large, extended group of relatives. As a child, Naipaul noted the constant quarreling and shifting alliances of this huge family, which aroused an anxiety that stayed with him into his adult life. Later, some of his writing would re-create this atmosphere with precision.

Naipaul’s parents and siblings moved to Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad, in 1938, where he studied at Queen’s Royal College. Although this was the one of the premier schools in Trinidad, Naipaul later realized that his education there had been very “abstract,” a European education that had no relationship to the life on his island and in his community. The move to Port of Spain, however, enlarged his primarily Indian world, but it also led to his losing the ability to speak the Hindu language.

Seepersand, Naipaul’s father, married into the Capildeo family, one of the most important orthodox Hindu families in Trinidad. His father spent much of his life attempting to escape dependency on his in-laws. With the move to Port of Spain, he became a journalist at the Trinidad Guardian but longed to be a fiction writer. He published several short stories and transmitted his ambitions to his son, who knew that he wanted to be a writer by the age of eleven. In the foreword to A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), Naipaul credits his father with making writing appear the noblest vocation. By the time he was eighteen years old, Naipaul had written his first novel, which was rejected by a publisher.

Naipaul left Trinidad in 1950 after winning a scholarship to study English at University College, Oxford. While there he met Patricia Hale, a teacher, and the two married in 1955. After graduating from Oxford, Naipaul single-mindedly began his career as a writer.

Life’s Work

After finishing his studies, Naipaul moved to London and earned a living by working as a freelance writer and editor for the British Broadcasting Company. Between 1954 and 1956 he was a regular fiction reviewer for the New Statesman. During these years he had begun working on his book, Miguel Street, which was a collection of linked short stories published in 1959. Together with The Mystic Masseur (1957) and The Suffrage of Elvira (1963), these first three books of fiction have a similar theme: the brutality and corruption against many hopeless, impoverished people. Although the theme is serious, it is treated with humor and without the analytic point of view he developed in later novels. These three books also evoke the social culture of the late 1930s and 1940s in Trinidad.

Naipaul’s first major novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, is one of his most formal and conventional, yet it avoids the suspense of a tight plot. The novel relies instead on Naipaul’s profound insights into character and an abundance of detail to capture and hold his readers. Mr. Biswas, who is modeled on Naipaul’s father, is an individual rebelling against the pressure to conform to a West Indian society. After writing A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul accepted a grant to return to Trinidad and write a book about the Caribbean. The Middle Passage (1962) is the first of his travel books and is written from the perspective of a European traveler to the colonies. Naipaul developed his own form and style for travel books only later with the writing of Guerrillas (1975), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), The Return of Eva Perón (1980), and A Congo Diary (1980).

In 1970, after several years of travel to the West Indies, Central America, and North America, Naipaul returned to England and started working on the novel In a Free State at a cottage in Wiltshire, described later in The Enigma of Arrival (1987). Both the form and the content of In a Free State are shattered and varied. The novel consists of a prologue, epilogue, and three short stories. Violence persists throughout in varying degrees. This book was followed by a collection of Naipaul’s journalism and another novel, Guerrillas , which is based on murders that occurred in Trinidad. A more overtly political novel, A Bend in the River, followed in 1979.

In the early 1980s, Naipaul traveled quite a bit and published several books of journalism, including Among the Believers, based on his journeys in Islamic countries. The Enigma of Arrival , a semifictional account of his life in England, written in an almost circular form, turns again and again to the grounds of the estate where his character rents a cottage. The novel describes the scenery of this valley , its various seasons through the years, and the never-ending, cyclical nature of the appearance of the estate’s residents during several stages of their lives. Interwoven with these precise observations are the insecurities and doubts of the writer’s life, which give some idea of Naipaul’s struggles. This circularity, or structure of recurrences, is one of the hallmarks of Naipaul’s style in each novel. Recurrence also is a link between Naipaul’s books that often rework earlier material.

A Way in the World , Naipaul’s long-awaited novel, appeared in 1994, another collection of intersecting stories, partly biographical and partly a fictionalized history of colonialism and its effects. The narrator is a Trinidadian writer of Indian ancestry and English residence, who probes the meaning of transience, an important aspect of human history.

During the 1990s, Naipaul wrote and published mostly nonfiction works such as India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). In 1996, he returned to the Islamic world to do research for Beyond Belief (1998), but his wife died that same year. Naipaul then wed Nadira Alvi, a Pakistani journalist. In 1999, he published Letters Between a Father and Son. In 2000, he published Reading and Writing, and in 2001, he published Half a Life, a novel. A sequel, Magic Seeds, followed in 2004, at which time Naipaul announced his intention to retire.

While Naipaul did not write anymore fiction over the remainder of his life, he did not stop writing entirely, choosing to focus his last works on nonfiction. In 2002, he had published the essay collection The Writer and the World. After publishing the book A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (2007), which serves as a combination of literary criticism and memoir, he wrote and published the work The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010). In the latter book, he details his observations of religion and spirituality noted during travels to African countries such as Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa between 2008 and 2009.

Naipaul died at his home in London, England, on August 11, 2018, at the age of eighty-five.

Significance

Naipaul’s work draws no sharp distinction between fiction and nonfiction. He wrote in both genres. His work has attracted much controversy because it displays ambiguity toward his major subjects: the history and effect of empire and colonialism. In the face of this controversy, he remained one of the most successful of the generation of writers who left the Caribbean in the 1950s.

Over the years, Naipaul was recognized with a succession of awards, including the Booker Prize in 1971 for In a Free State. He was knighted in 1989, and in 1993 he won the first David Cohen British Literature Prize for lifetime achievement by a British writer still living. In 2001, Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in Literature and was praised by the Swedish academy for creating works that “compel” the world’s readers “to see the presence of suppressed histories.”

Bibliography

Barnouw, Dagmar. Naipaul’s Strangers. Indiana UP, 2003. An analysis of the characters who populate both Naipaul’s fiction and nonfiction. Addresses, especially, the terms of the obscure composite nature of cultural identity.

Bucknor, Michael, and Alison Donnell. The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean. Routledge, 2011.

Donadio, Rachel. "V. S. Naipaul, Who Explored Colonialism through Unsparing Books, Dies at 85." The New York Times, 11 Aug. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/obituaries/vs-naipaul-dead-author-nobel-prize.html. Accessed 4 Sept. 2018.

Dooley, Gillian. V. S. Naipaul: Man and Writer. U of South Carolina P, 2006. A biography of Naipaul based on his biographical writings and especially his travel writings, which reveal a great deal about the writer.

Hayward, Helen. The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul. Palgrave, 2002. This book supports the theory that Naipaul’s detachment from social movements, governments, and religion can be explained by his maturing in a displaced minority community where he received a colonial education that alienated him from the surrounding culture.

King, Bruce. V. S. Naipaul. 2nd ed., Palgrave , 2003. An updated version of a biography first published in 1993. Four new chapters covering recent novels, his two books on Islam, and new biographical and interpretive material.

Naipaul, V. S. Literary Occasions. Knopf, 2003. A series of personal essays that document, among other things, how Naipaul struggled to find the subject that occupied most of his life and was the major theme of his work.

Rahim, Jennifer, and Barbara Lalla. Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul. Randle, 2011.