Nobel prize winning author VS Naipaul dies aged 85

Trinidad-born British author VS Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001, has died at his home in London aged 85, the BBC reported on Saturday.

Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul has passed away at his home in London at the age of 85, the BBC reported on Saturday.

His wife Nadira Naipaul released a statement calling him a "giant in all that he achieved" and said he had died surrounded by "those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour", the BBC said.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul published his first novel, ‘The Mystic Masseur’, in 1957, and won the Jonathan Llewellyn Rhys prize.

But his international breakthrough came in 1961 with ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ - the picaresque story of Mr Mohun Biswas, a man born to Indian parents in Trinidad, who marries into a wealthy and overbearing family and struggles to create a place of his own in the world.

As Teju Cole notes in a review in The Guardian, the tragicomedy opens with a moment of relief. Mr Biswas can claim to have a home of his own before he dies. As the prologue says:

“How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it: to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.”

The book cemented Naipaul’s position as one of the eminent literary voices of his generation. In 1998 it was ranked among the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best English-language Novels of the 20th century.

Writer VS Naipaul waits to receive his Nobel prize for literature at Stockholm's Konserthuset from Sweden's King Carl Gustaf, Sweden Dec 10, 2001. Reuters

For Naipaul, the book and its explorations of place and identity were partially autobiographical.

He was born into an Indian family living in as he once said, “an immigrant Asian community in a small plantation island in the New World” of rural Trinidad in 1932. He never felt at home in the community and he eventually travelled to Oxford in 1950 to study English.

He settled in the UK and set the course of an illustrious literary career that included critically acclaimed works such as ‘In a Free State’, ‘The Mimic Men’ and ‘A Bend in the River’. He was even knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1989. But Naipaul never laid down roots in the country. As the Swedish Academy said when awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, he was “a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice.”

But alongside the acclaim came criticism, especially from those who took issue with his views on the colonised world.

Following his early novels, his work became dominated by a Western worldview, wrote Amitav Ghosh in 2001.

“After this, 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. In this phantom contrast, the non-Western could never be anything other than insubstantial - a world defined by what it lacked.”

Noted intellectual Edward Said accused Naipaul of allowing himself “quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution”.

“He is a third worlder denouncing his own people, not because they are victims of imperialism, but because they seem to have an innate flaw, which is that they are not whites,” he wrote.

Naipaul claimed to be undisturbed by the criticism.

“When I read those things, I am immensely amused,” he told The Observer in 2008. “They don’t wound me at all.”   

He was also no stranger to controversy. In 2001 he said Islam had had a ‘calamitous’ effect on the world comparable to colonialism. In an interview with the Royal Geographic Society in 2011, he said:

"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."

This was because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world", he said.

Naipaul also received criticism for his behaviour towards the women in his life, including his frequenting of sex workers during his marriage to Patricia Anne Hale Naipaul and his self-professed violent relationship with his mistress.

But even detractors had admiration for Naipaul’s work. As literary critic Terry Eagleton said:

“Great art; terrible politics.”

The sentiment was echoed by author Salman Rushdie, who wrote upon news of Naipaul’s death:

“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.”