Misplaced Pages

V. S. Naipaul: Difference between revisions

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Browse history interactively← Previous editContent deleted Content addedVisualWikitext
Revision as of 22:48, 13 August 2007 editAndrew c (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users31,890 edits clean up and re-categorisation per CFD using AWB← Previous edit Latest revision as of 22:33, 9 December 2024 edit undoFowler&fowler (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Extended confirmed users, File movers, Pending changes reviewers, Rollbackers62,963 editsm Reverted edit by 2601:14D:8A00:9E10:298D:B61E:4573:A59A (talk) to last version by GrueslayerTag: Rollback 
Line 1: Line 1:
{{Short description|Trinidadian-British writer (1932–2018)}}
'''Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul''', ] (born ], ], in ], ]), better known as '''V. S. Naipaul''', is a ]-born ] writer of ] ethnicity and ] ancestry from ] in Eastern ], ]. Naipaul lives now in ], ].
{{Use dmy dates|date=October 2019}}
{{EngvarB|date=August 2023}}
{{Infobox writer
| honorific_prefix = Sir<!-- do not link per MOS:OVERLINK -->
| honorific_suffix = ] ]
| image = VS Naipaul 2016 Dhaka (cropped).jpg
| caption = Naipaul in 2016
| birth_name = Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
| birth_date = {{birth date|1932|08|17|df=yes}}
| birth_place = ], ]
| death_date = {{death date and age|2018|08|11|1932|08|17|df=yes}}
| death_place = London, England
| occupation = {{cslist|Novelist|travel writer|essayist}}
| nationality = <!-- use only when necessary per ] --><!-- <ref name="NP">{{cite web | url=https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/press.html | title=The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001 – V. S. Naipaul | publisher=Nobel Foundation | access-date=7 May 2017 | url-status=live | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170504145641/http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/press.html | archive-date=4 May 2017 | df=dmy-all }}</ref> -->
| alma_mater = ]
| period = 1957–2010
| notableworks = {{plainlist|
*'']'' (1961)
*'']'' (1971)
*'']'' (1979)
*'']'' (1987)
}}
| awards = {{plainlist|
* ] (1971)
* ] (1983)
* ] (1990)
* ] (1990)
* ] (2001)
}}
| spouses = {{plainlist|
* {{marriage|Patricia Ann Hale|1955|1996|reason=died}}
* {{marriage|]|1996}}
}}
| parents = ] (father)
| relatives = {{plainlist|
* ] (brother)
* ]
}}
}}
'''Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul'''{{refn|Meaning: ''vidiādhar'' (] "possessed of learning", (p. 921) from ''vidyā'' (] "knowledge, learning", p. 921) + ''dhar'' (] "holding, supporting," p. 524)); ''sūrajprasād'' (from ''sūraj'' (] "sun", p. 1036) + ''prasād'' (] "gift, boon, blessing", p. 666)) from {{Cite book|last=McGregor|first=R. S.|author-link=R. S. McGregor|title=The Oxford Hindi–English Dictionary|url=https://archive.org/details/oxfordhindiengli00mcgr_0|url-access=registration|year=1993|publisher=Oxford University Press.|isbn=9780198643395}}|group=nb}} {{post-nominals|list=] ]}} ({{IPAc-en|ˈ|v|ɪ|d|j|ɑː|d|ər|_|ˌ|s|uː|r|ə|dʒ|p|r|ə|ˈ|s|ɑː|d|_|ˈ|n|aɪ|p|ɔː|l|,_|n|aɪ|ˈ|p|ɔː|l}}; 17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018) was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years.


Naipaul's breakthrough novel '']'' was published in 1961. Naipaul won the ] in 1971 for his novel '']''.<ref name="Booker Prize 1971">{{Cite web|title=The Booker Prize 1971 &#124; The Booker Prizes|url=https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/1971|access-date=2022-08-03|website=thebookerprizes.com|language=en}}</ref> He won the ] in 1983, and in 1990, he was awarded the ], Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honour. He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and the ] in 2001.
Naipaul was awarded the ] in ] and knighted by ] in ]. Sir Vidia is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors ], ], ], and ], respectively. His current wife is ], a former journalist.


== Life and career ==
==Assessment of his work==
In awarding Naipaul the ] in ], the Swedish Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." The Committee added, "Naipaul is a modern ], carrying on the tradition that started originally with '']'' and '']''. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony." The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the Polish author of ], ]: "Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished."


===Background and early life===
His ] and especially his ] have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the ]. ], for example, has argued that he "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting "colonial mythologies about ]s and darkies".<ref>http://www.postcolonialweb.org/caribbean/naipaul/said.html</ref> This perspective is most salient in ''The Middle Passage'', which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and '']'', an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of ]. His supporters observe that he is actually an advocate for a more realistic development of the Third World, that he is motivated by a passionate desire for the improvement of the countries which he writes about, and that the assumptions of "ideologues" like Said actually hold these emerging nations back. That said, Naipaul's contempt for many aspects of liberal orthodoxy is uncompromising, yet he has exhibited an open-mindedness toward some Third World leaders and cultures that isn't found in western writers. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul's following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. V.S. Naipul also served on the faculty of ] in Middletown, Connecticut.
{{Quote box
|width = 12em
|border = 1px
|align = right
|bgcolor =#D0F0F0
|fontsize = 85% 111111
|title_bg =
|title_fnt =
|title =
|quote = "Where there had been swamp at the foot of the ], with mud huts with earthen walls that showed the damp halfway up ... there was now the landscape of Holland&nbsp;... Sugarcane as a crop had ceased to be important. None of the Indian villages were like villages I had known. No narrow roads; no dark, overhanging trees; no huts; no earth yards with hibiscus hedges; no ceremonial lighting of lamps, no play of shadows on the wall; no cooking of food in half-walled verandas, no leaping firelight; no flowers along gutters or ditches where frogs croaked the night away."{{Sfn|Naipaul|1987|p=352}}
|salign = right
|source =&nbsp;— From ''Enigma of Arrival'' (1987)
}}
V. S. Naipaul was born to Droapatie (''née'' ]) and ] on 17 August 1932 in the ]-town of ] on the island of ], the larger of the two islands in the British ] of ]<!--Don't change to ]; no place by that name ever existed-->.{{Sfn|Hayward|2002|p=5}} He was the couple's second child and first son.{{Sfn|Hayward|2002|p=5}}


Naipaul's father, Seepersad, was an English-language journalist.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=18b|ps=:"There was talk of him (Seepersad) becoming a pundit, and he learned some Sanskrit. Soookdeo Misir, ... gave him a basic education. ... by the time he was in his late teens, he had escaped from the likely future as an agricultural labourer in the grim depths of the rural Indian community. He had taught himself how to read and write English, and had conceived the idea of becoming a journalist, a profession that was usually open to Whites and Negroes."}} In 1929, he had begun contributing stories to the '']'',{{Sfn|French|2008|p=19|ps=: "In 1929, the year of his marriage, Seepersad began work as a freelance reporter on the ''Trinidad Guardian'', ..."}} and in 1932 he joined the staff as the provincial Chaguanas correspondent.{{Sfn|Hayward|2002|p=7}} In "A prologue to an autobiography" (1983), Naipaul describes how Seepersad's great reverence for writers and for the writing life spawned the dreams and aspirations of his eldest son.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=36–37|ps=: "Vido spent much of his time at Petit Valley with Pa, who would read to him and sometimes to other children: extracts from ''Julius Caesar'', ''Nicholas Nickleby'', ''Three Men in a Boat'', ... Pa and Vido positioned themselves in an ordered fantasy world derived from European literature ... Aspiration and ambition became the alternative to daily life ..."}}
Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably "analysed" India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in '']''), and later with 'grudging affection' (as in '']''), and of late perhaps even with 'ungrudging affection' (most manifestly in his view that the rise of ] embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, or at least to locate the general area where his ancestors may have travelled. The greater frequency of his visits to India in recent years may, according to Naipaul-watchers, also signify, at least in part, a yearning for 'identity'.


In the 1880s, Naipaul's paternal grandfather had emigrated from ] to work as an ] in a sugar plantation.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=12}} In the 1890s, his maternal grandfather was to do the same.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=12}} During this time, many people in India, their prospects blighted by the ], or similar calamities,{{Sfn|Visaria|Visaria|1983|p=515,a|ps=: Quote: "A majority of the emigrants were from rural areas and from 'overcrowded agricultural districts' where 'crop failure could plunge sections of the village community into near-starvation'. In fact, there was a strong correlation between emigration and harvest conditions. Acute scarcity during 1873–5 in ], ] and the ] provoked large-scale emigration through the port of ]. The famine in south India during 1874–8 also resulted in heavy emigration."}} had emigrated to distant outposts of the British Empire such as Trinidad, ], ], ], ], ], ], ], the French colonies of ] and ], and the Dutch colony of ].{{Sfn|Visaria|Visaria|1983|p=515,b|ps=: Quote: "Most of the emigrants probably left even their villages of origin for the first time in their lives, and they were not fully aware of the hardships involved in long voyages and in living abroad. Diseases — cholera, typhoid, dysentery — were often rampant in depots or temporary abodes for labourers at ports of embarkation and also on ships. Consequently, mortality among the recruits and emigrants was very high. The data on long voyages to British Guiana and the West Indies clearly show that mortality at sea was alarmingly high. Before 1870, on an average about 17 to 20 per cent of the labourers departing from Calcutta port died on the ships before reaching their destination."}} Although slavery had been ] in these places in 1833, slave labour was still in demand, and ] was the legal contract being drawn to meet the demand.{{Sfn|Hayward|2002|p=5}}{{Sfn|French|2008|p=5|ps=: "When slavery was formally abolished across the British empire in 1834 and cheap labour was needed for the sugar-can plantations, malnourished Indians were shipped over from Calcutta and Madras. ... Black agricultural labourers found their wages being undercut. They looked down on the Indians, who had to work long hours in the cane fields, as the 'new slaves'."}}
Writing in the about Naipaul, Joan Didion said:
:The actual world has for Naipaul a radiance that diminishes all ideas of it. The pink haze of the bauxite dust on the first page of ''Guerrillas'' tells us what we need to know about the history and social organization of the unnamed island on which the action takes place, tells us in one image who runs the island and for whose profit the island is run and at what cost to the life of the island this profit has historically been obtained, but all of this implicit information pales in the presence of the physical fact, the dust itself... The world Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual human endeavor... This world of Naipaul's is in fact charged with what can only be described as a romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact...


According to the genealogy the Naipauls had reconstructed in Trinidad, they were ] ]s&mdash;embraced from the knowledge of his mother's family; his father's background had remained less certain.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=23–25|ps=:"The three surviving photographs of Capildeo Maharah (Naipaul's maternal grandfather) show him looking distinctly Brahminical. ... He wears white clothing befitting his caste, his shoes are unlaced to indicate that he has not touched leather with his hand, ... This physical evidence, combined with the certainty that he knew Sanskrit, make his claimed family lineage highly plausible. ... Seepersad's antecedents are vague; he never liked to discuss his childhood. ... Nyepaul (Naipaul's paternal grandfather) may have been a pure Brahmin, a Brahmin-by-boat, or he may have come from another caste background altogether. ... V. S. Naipaul never addressed this inconsistency, preferring to embrace the implied "caste sense" of his mother's family, ..."}} Their ancestors in India had been guided by ritual restrictions. Among these were those on food—including the prohibition against eating flesh—drink, attire and social interaction.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=55a|ps=: "Hinduism had regulations on all things: clothing, ritual pollution, caste distinction, bodily functions, diet."}}
In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul's support for ] has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the ] as a "creative passion", and the invasion of ] in the ] as a "mortal wound." He views ], which fell in ], as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in ], which he bitingly condemned in ''Among the Believers''.
{{multiple image|perrow = 2|total_width = 340|caption_align = center
| align = left
| image_style = border:none;
| image2 = Indian Women go Shopping in Port of Spain, Trinidad, 1945, National Archives, UK.jpg
| image1 = Trinidad and Tobago Shaded Relief PCL Texas Annotated.jpg
| footer = {{font|size=100%|font=Sans-serif|text=(Left) ] is just inward of the ] coast. ] and ] were fictionalised as ''County Naparoni'' in Naipaul's '']''. (Right) Indian women go shopping in ], ], 1945.}}
}}
In Trinidad, the restrictions were to gradually loosen. By the time of Naipaul's earliest childhood memories, chicken and fish were eaten at the family's dining table, and Christmas was celebrated with a dinner.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=55b|ps=: The Naipaul family were not vegetarian, as most Brahmins are supposed to be; they sometimes ate meat, and treated chicken as a vegetable. At Christmas, they would celebrate with baked fowl, dalpuri, nuts and fruit."}} The men wore only western clothes. The women's ]s were being accessorised with belts and heeled footwear, their ]s rising in imitation of the ], and they were soon to disappear altogether as an item of daily wear.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=208–209|ps=: (caption) Above left: "Vidia with his glamorous sisters, ... Long gone were the days of covered heads and traditional dress for Indian women in Trinidad. Above right: Ma (Naipaul's mother) in heels with an Oxford-returned Vidia, 1956."}} Disappearing as well were the languages of India. Naipaul and his siblings were encouraged to speak only English.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=26|ps=: "What Nanie (Naipaul's maternal grandmother) said, went. .... (quoted) 'Nanie believed in the Hindu way of life but the irony of it is, she would help with the churches and celebrate all the Catholic festivals ... She told us that she wanted us to speak in English, not Hindi, because we had to be educated.'"}} At school, other languages were taught, but these were usually Spanish and ].{{Sfn|French|2008|p=41}}


Naipaul's family moved to Trinidad's capital ], at first when he was seven,{{Sfn|French|2008|p=30|ps=: "Nanie had bought a house, 17 Luis Street, in the Port of Spain suburb of Woodbrook ... This coincided with Seeperdad's recovery from his nervous breakdown, and his success in 1938 in regaining his job as a ''Guardian'' journalist. It was decided that the Naipaul family ... would move to Luis Street."}} and then more permanently when he was nine.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=32–33|ps=: "The idyll could not last. In 1940, Seepersad and Droapatie were told by Nanie that they would be moving to a new family commune at a place called Petite valley. ... In 1943, Seepersad could stand it no longer at Petit Valley and the Naipaul family moved in desperation to 17 Luis Street.}}
In ] a controversial ] by Naipaul's sometime protégé ] was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled '']'', was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier.
In 1971, he became the first person of Indian origin to win a ] for his book ''In a Free State''.


===1943–1954: Education: Port of Spain and Oxford===
==Personal life==
{{Gallery
Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in ] and was raised in ]. She worked as a ] for ], ''The Nation'' for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in ], two months after the death of Naipaul's first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir. <ref>http://www.hvk.org/articles/0103/315.html</ref>
|align=right
|width=130 |File:Students at Queens Royal College Port of Spain with Visitor 1955.jpg|Naipaul attended the government-run ] (QRC), a high school, Port of Spain from 1942 to 1950. Shown here are some older students at QRC talking to a visitor in 1955.
|File:High Street Oxford showing University College on the left.jpg|A 1790 aquatint of ], showing ] in the left foreground. A century and a half later, V. S. Naipaul would spend four years at the college.
}}


Naipaul was enrolled in the government-run ] (QRC), an urban, cosmopolitan, high-performing school, which was designed and functioned in the fashion of a British boys' ].{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=40–41|ps=: "QRC was modelled on an English boys' public school, and offered a high standard of education. ... He enjoyed his classes n Latin, French, Spanish and Science. It was a highly competitive school, with metropolitan values. Caribbean dialect was ironed out in favour of standard English, although the students remained bilingual ...."}} Before he turned 17, he won a Trinidad Government scholarship to study abroad. He reflected later that the scholarship would have allowed him to study any subject at any institution of higher learning in the ], but that he chose to go to ] to do a degree in English. He went, he wrote, "in order at last to write...." In August 1950, Naipaul boarded a ] flight to New York, continuing the next day by boat to London.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=67}} He left Trinidad, like the narrator of '']'', hardening himself to the emotion displayed by his family.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=67}} For recording the impressions of his journey, Naipaul purchased a pad of paper and a ], noting, "I had bought the pad and pencil because I was travelling to become a writer, and I had to start."{{Sfn|French|2008|p=67}} The copious notes and letters from that time were to become the basis for the chapter "Journey" in Naipaul's novel '']'' written 37 years later.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=67}}
==Awards==
* ] - ]
* ] - ]
* ] - ]
* ] - ]
1977 Declined to be ] (CBE)


Arriving at Oxford for the ], 1950, Naipaul judged himself adequately prepared for his studies;{{Sfn|French|2008|p=73a|ps=: "Vidia thought that the quality of the education he had received at QRC put him ahead of his (Oxford) contemporaries."}} in the judgment of his Latin tutor, ], Naipaul showed promise and poise.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=73b|ps=: "Peter Bayley remembers Vidia reading a later essay on Milton's ''Paradise Lost'' ... 'I knew I had a winner.'"}}{{Sfn|French|2008|p=96|ps=: "Peter Bayley had been impressed with Vidia's confidence, ... Vidia, then, was able to adjust and compose himself in a social, formal setting."}} But, a year later, in Naipaul's estimation, his attempts at writing felt contrived. Unsure of his ability and calling, and lonely, he became depressed.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=90}} By late March 1952, plans were made for his return to Trinidad in the summer.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=91}} His father put down a quarter of the passage.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=91}} However, in early April, in the '']s'' before the ], Naipaul took an impulsive trip to Spain, and quickly spent all he had saved.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=92–93}} Attempting an explanation to his family, he called it "a nervous breakdown".{{Sfn|French|2008|p=93|ps=: "When Vidia got back to England, he was in a bad state. Trinidad was off. 'The fact is,' he admitted, 'I spent too much money in Spain. And, during the nervous breakdown (yes, it was that) I had, I grew rash and reckless ... My only opportunity of recuperating from my present chaos is to remain in England this summer and live very cheaply.'"}} Thirty years later, he was to call it "something like a mental illness."{{Sfn|Jussawalla|1997|p=126|ps=: "At Oxford he continued to suffer. 'I drifted into something like a mental illness,' he would write."}}
==Bibliography==
''' Fiction'''
*'']'' - (]) (film version: ] (2001))
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']'' - (])
*'']''
'''Non-fiction'''


Earlier in 1952, at a college play, Naipaul had met Patricia Ann Hale, a history student. Hale and Naipaul formed a close friendship, which eventually developed into a sexual relationship. With Hale's support, Naipaul began to recover and gradually to write. In turn, she became a partner in planning his career. When they told their families about their relationship, the response was unenthusiastic; from her family it was hostile. In June 1953, both Naipaul and Hale graduated, both receiving, in his words, "a damn, bloody, ... ]."{{Sfn|French|2008|p=115}} ], professor of ] at Oxford, however, judged Naipaul's Anglo-Saxon paper to have been the best in the university.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=115}}
* ''The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies - British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America'' (])
*'']'' (])
*'']'' - (])
* The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (])
* '']'' (])
* A Congo Diary (])
* The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad (])
* '']'' (])
* Finding the Centre (])
* Reading & Writing: A Personal Account (])
* A Turn in the South (])
* '']'' (])
* Homeless by Choice (], with R. Jhabvala and ])
* Bombay (], with Raghubir Singh)
* Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (])
* Between Father and Son: Family Letters (], edited by Gillon Aitken)
*'']'' - (])
* Literary Occasions: Essays (], by Pankaj Mishra)


In Trinidad, Naipaul's father had had a ] in early 1953,{{Sfn|French|2008|p=111}} and lost his job at the ''Guardian'' in the summer.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=118}} In October 1953, Seepersad Naipaul died.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=123}} By Hindu tenets, it fell to Naipaul to light the funeral pyre—it was the mandatory ritual of the eldest son. But since there was not the time nor the money for Naipaul to return, his eight-year-old brother, ], performed the final rites of cremation. "The event marked him," Naipaul wrote about his brother. "That death and cremation were his private wound."{{Sfn|Naipaul|1987|p=346}}
==Further reading==
* Girdharry, Arnold (2004) ''The Wounds of Naipaul and the Women in His Indian Trilogy'' (Copley).
* Barnouw, Dagmar (2003) ''Naipaul's Strangers'' (Indiana University Press).
* Dissanayake, Wimal (1993) ''Self and Colonial Desire: Travel Writings of V.S. Naipaul'' (P. Lang).
* Hamner, Robert (1973). ''V.S. Naipaul'' (Twayne).
* Hammer, Robert ed. (1979) ''Critical Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul'' (Heinemann).
* Hayward, Helen (2002) ''The Enigma of V.S. Naipaul: Sources and Contexts'' (Macmillan).
* Hughes, Peter (1988) ''V.S. Naipaul'' (Routledge).
* Jarvis, Kelvin (1989) ''V.S. Naipaul: A Selective Bibliography with Annotations, 1957–1987'' (Scarecrow).
* Jussawalla, Feroza, ed. (1997) ''Conversations with V.S. Naipaul'' (University Press of Mississippi).
* Kelly, Richard (1989) ''V.S. Naipaul'' (Continuum).
* Khan, Akhtar Jamal (1998) ''V.S. Naipaul: A Critical Study'' (Creative Books)
* King, Bruce (1993) ''V.S. Naipaul'' (Macmillan).
* King, Bruce (2003) ''V.S. Naipaul'', 2nd ed (Macmillan)
* Kramer, Jane (] ]) , an assessment of Naipaul's work in the ''New York Times Book Review.''
* Levy, Judith (1995) ''V.S. Naipaul: Displacement and Autobiography'' (Garland).
* Nightingale, Peggy (1987) ''Journey through Darkness: The Writing of V.S. Naipaul'' (University of Queensland Press).
* Said, Edward (1986) ''Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World'' (Salmagundi).
* Theroux, Paul (1998) ''Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents'' (Houghton Mifflin).
* Theroux, Paul (1972). ''V.S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work'' (Deutsch).
* Weiss, Timothy F (1992) ''On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S. Naipaul'' (University of Massachusetts Press).


Through the summer and autumn of 1953, Naipaul was financially depleted. His prospects for employment in frugal post-war Britain were unpromising, his applications to jobs overseas repeatedly rejected, and his attempts at writing as yet haphazard.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=117–128}} Working off and on at odd jobs, borrowing money from Pat or his family in Trinidad, Naipaul reluctantly enrolled for a ] post-graduate degree at Oxford in ].{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=117–128}} In December 1953, he failed his first B.Litt. exam.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=117–128}} Although he passed the second written examination, his ], in February 1954, with ], an ] scholar and ] at Oxford, did not go well. He was failed overall for the B.Litt. degree.{{#tag:ref|According to Naipaul's authorised biographer ], Wilson was "a retired professor ... who was renowned for being taciturn and socially awkward." and that Naipaul blamed Wilson for failing him—in Naipaul's words—"deliberately and out of racial feeling."{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=117–128}} However, according to Wilson's ] biographers, Wilson retired later, in 1957, and was, "a master of social graces and a witty conversationalist."{{Sfn|Robertson|Connell|2004}}|group=nb}} With that also ended all hopes of being supported for academic studies at Oxford.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=128|ps=: "He remained at Oxford, the staff of the college library having given him and administrative job to tide him over."}} Naipaul would later say that he 'hated Oxford'.{{Sfn|Rosen|Tejpal|1998|ps=: "Actually, I hated Oxford. I hate those degrees and I hate all those ideas of universities. 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. I am not boasting, you know well—time has proved all these things. In a way, I had prepared too much for the outer world; there was a kind of solitude and despair, really, at Oxford. I wouldn't wish anyone to go through it.."}}
==References==

{{reflist}}
===1954–1956: London, ''Caribbean Voices'', marriage===

{{Gallery
|align=left
|width=130 |File:Pauline Enriques Sam Sevlon Caribbean Voices 1952.jpg| ] and ] reading a story on ]'s '']''. In December 1954, Naipaul joined the staff.
|File:Langham Hotel London post card 1903.JPG|The old ] in a picture-postcard ca. 1903. Here, in 1955 in the BBC freelancers' room, Naipaul wrote the first story of '']''.
}}
{{Quote box
|width = 12em
|border = 1px
|align = right
|bgcolor =#D0F0C0
|fontsize = 85%
|title_bg =
|title_fnt =
|title =
|quote = "The freelancers' room was like a club: chat, movement, the separate anxieties of young or youngish men below the passing fellowship of the room. That was the atmosphere I was writing in. That was the atmosphere I gave to Bogart's Port of Spain street. Partly for the sake of speed, and partly because my memory or imagination couldn't rise to it, I had given his servant room hardly any furniture: the Langham room itself was barely furnished. And I benefited from the fellowship of the room that afternoon. Without that fellowship, without the response of the three men who read the story, I might not have wanted to go on with what I had begun."
|salign = right
|source =&nbsp;— From, "A Prologue to an Autobiography" (1983).{{Sfn|Naipaul|1983c}}
}}
Naipaul moved to London, where he reluctantly accepted shelter in the flat of a cousin. Pat, who had won a scholarship for further studies at the University of Birmingham, moved out of her parents' flat to independent lodgings where Naipaul could visit her. For the remainder of 1954, Naipaul exhibited behaviour that tried the patience of those closest to him. He denounced Trinidad and Trinidadians; he castigated the British who he felt had taken him out of Trinidad but left him without opportunity; he took refuge in illness, but when help was offered, he rebuffed it. He was increasingly dependent on Pat, who remained loyal, offering him money, practical advice, encouragement, and rebuke.<ref>{{harvnb|French|2008|p=118|ps=:"Pat thought he needed to hurry up. 'If you haven't written in amongst the hurly burly you never will and what you write will never really be good. ...' She advised him not to get into debt, and asked him to send £1 that he owed her. Her affection was undimmed. 'I'm an absolute fool where you're concerned and (not to be told to your enormous ego) I really adore and worship that stupid expression ...'"}}</ref>

Gainful employment appeared for Naipaul in December 1954. ], producer of the BBC weekly programme, '']'', offered Naipaul a three-month renewable contract as presenter of the programme. Swanzy, on whose program a generation of Caribbean writers had debuted, including ], ], the 19-year-old ] and, earlier, Naipaul himself, was being transferred to ] to manage the ]. Naipaul would stay in the part-time job for four years, and Pat would remain the critical breadwinner for the couple.

In January 1955, Naipaul moved to new lodgings, a small flat in ], and he and Pat were married. Neither informed their families or friends—their wedding guests were limited to the two witnesses required by law. Pat continued to live in Birmingham but visited on the weekends. At the BBC, Naipaul presented the programme once a week, wrote short reviews and conducted interviews. The sparsely furnished freelancers' room in the old ] flowed with the banter of Caribbean writers and would-be writers, providing camaraderie and fellowship. There, one afternoon in the summer of 1955, Naipaul typed out a 3,000-word story. It was based on the memory of a neighbour he had known as a child in a ] street, but it also drew on the mood and ambience of the freelancers' room. Three fellow writers, John Stockbridge, ], and Gordon Woolford, who read the story later, were affected by it and encouraged him to go on. Over the next five weeks, Naipaul would write his first publishable book, '']'', a collection of linked stories of that Port of Spain street. Although the book was not published right away, Naipaul's talent caught the attention of publishers and his spirits began to lift.

===1956–1958: Early Trinidad novels===
] ''Cavina'', the peacetime ] passenger-carrying ], shown in 1941, requisitioned for ]. In August 1956, Naipaul returned on ] Cavina to Trinidad for a two-month stay with his family.]]
], the editor at the publishing company André Deutsch, who read ''Miguel Street'', liked it. But the publisher, ], thought a series of linked stories by an unknown Caribbean writer unlikely to sell profitably in Britain.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=155–156}} He encouraged Naipaul to write a novel.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=155–156}} Without enthusiasm, Naipaul quickly wrote '']'' in Autumn 1955.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=155–156}} On 8 December 1955, his novel was accepted by Deutsch, and Naipaul received a ]125 payment.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=155–156}}

In late August 1956, six years after arriving in England, three years after his father's death, and in the face of pressure from his family in Trinidad, especially his mother, to visit, Naipaul boarded ] ''Cavina'', an ] passenger-carrying ], in ].{{Sfn|French|2008|p=160}} From on board the ship, he sent harsh and humorous descriptions of the ship's ] passengers to Pat, recording also their conversations in dialect.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=161}} His early letters from Trinidad spoke to the wealth created there during the intervening years, in contrast to the prevailing frugal economy in Britain.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=163}} Trinidad was in its last phase before decolonisation, and there was a new-found confidence among its citizens.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=164–165}} Among Trinidad's different racial groups, there were also avowals of racial separateness—in contrast to the fluid, open racial attitudes of Naipaul's childhood—and there was violence.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=165}} In the elections of 1956, the party supported by the majority blacks and Indian Muslims narrowly won, leading to an increased sense of gloom in Naipaul.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=167–168}} Naipaul accompanied a politician uncle, a candidate of the Hindu party, to his campaign rallies.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=171–172}} During these and other events he was gathering ideas for later literary use.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=171–172}} By the time he left Trinidad, he had written to Pat about plans for a new novelette on a rural election in Trinidad.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=171–172}} These would transmute upon his return to England into the comic novel '']''.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=171–172}}

Back in England, Deutsch informed Naipaul that ''The Mystic Masseur'' would not be published for another ten months. Naipaul's anger at the publisher together with his anxiety about surviving as a writer aroused more creative energy: ''The Suffrage of Elvira'' was written with great speed during the early months of 1957.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=173}} In June 1957, ''The Mystic Masseur'' was finally published. The reviews were generally complimentary, though some were also patronising. Still shy of his 25th birthday, Naipaul copied out many of the reviews by hand for his mother, including the {{em|Daily Telegraph}}'s, "V. S. Naipaul is a young writer who contrives to blend Oxford wit with home-grown rambunctiousness and not do harm to either."{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=174–175}} Awaiting his book royalties, in summer 1957, Naipaul accepted his only full-time employment, the position of editorial assistant at the Cement and Concrete Association (C&CA). The association published the magazine ''Concrete Quarterly''.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=180–181}} Although he disliked the desk job and remained in it for a mere ten weeks, the salary of £1,000 a year provided financial stability, allowing him to send money to Trinidad.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=180–181}} The C&CA was also to be the office setting for Naipaul's later novel, ''Mr Stone and the Knights Companion''.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=180–181}} Around this same time, writer ], who had taken Naipaul under his wing, introduced him to novelist ]. Powell, in turn, convinced the publisher of the '']'', ], to give Naipaul a part-time job reviewing books.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=186–187}} Naipaul would review books once a month from 1957 to 1961.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=186–187}}

With many West Indian writers now active in England, ''Caribbean Voices'' was judged to have achieved its purpose and slated to terminate in August 1958.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=179}} Naipaul's relations with his BBC employers began to fray. Despite three years of hosting the programme and three completed novels, he had been unable to make the transition to mainstream BBC programming. He claimed later that he was told those jobs were reserved for Europeans.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=178–179}} In July 1958, after arriving late for a program, Naipaul was reprimanded by the producers, and, in his words, "broke with the BBC".{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=179–180}}

With promotional help from Andre Deutsh, Naipaul's novels would soon receive critical acclaim.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=185}} ''The Mystic Masseur'' was awarded the ] in 1958, and ''Miguel Street'' the ] in 1961, ] himself approving the first-ever selection of a non-European.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=185}}

===1957–1960: ''A House for Mr Biswas'' ===
], father of V. S. Naipaul, and the inspiration for the protagonist of the novel, Mr Biswas, with his ]]]

Not long after Naipaul began writing ''A House for Mr Biswas'', he and Pat moved across town from their attic flat in ] to an upstairs flat in ].{{Sfn|French|2008|p=184}} It was the first home in which they felt comfortable.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=184}} In his foreword to the 1983 ] edition of the book, Naipaul was to write: <blockquote> "I had more than changed flats: for the first time in my life I enjoyed solitude and freedom in a house. And just as, in the novel, I was able to let myself go, so in the solitude of the quiet, friendly house in Streatham Hill I could let myself go. ... The two years spent on this novel in Streatham Hill remain the most consuming, the most fulfilled, the happiest years of my life. They were my Eden."{{Sfn|Naipaul|1983a|pp=133, 136}}</blockquote>
The book is an imagined version of his father's life as fashioned from childhood memories.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=192}} The story as it evolved became so real for Naipaul, that he later claimed it had "destroyed memory" in some respects.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=192}} The protagonist, Mohun Biswas, referred to throughout the book as Mr Biswas, is propelled by the forces of circumstance into a succession of vocations: apprentice to a Hindu priest; a signboard painter; a grocery store proprietor in the "heart of the sugarcane area"; a driver, or "sub-overseer," in a dark, damp and overgrown estate; and a reporter for ''The Trinidad Sentinel''.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=193}} What ambition or resourcefulness Mr Biswas possesses is inevitably undermined by his dependence on his powerful in-laws and the vagaries of opportunity in a colonial society.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=193}} His in-laws, the Tulsis, with whom he lives much of the time, are a large ], and are caricatured with great humour, and some unkindness, in the novel.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=193}}
There is a melancholic streak in Mr Biswas which makes him at times both purposeless and clumsy, but it also stirs flashes of anger and of sniping wit.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=194}} Humour underpins the many tense relationships in the book.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=194}} Eventually, as times change, as two of his children go abroad for college, and as ill health overcomes him, he buys a house, with money borrowed from a friend, and moves into it with his wife and remaining children, and in small measure strikes out on his own before he dies at age 46.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=194}} According to the author ], ''A House for Mr Biswas'' is "universal in the way that the work of Dickens or Tolstoy is universal; the book makes no apologies for itself, and does not contextualize or exoticize its characters. It reveals a complete world."{{Sfn|French|2008|p=193}}

The writing of the book consumed Naipaul. In 1983, he would write:<blockquote>The book took three years to write. It felt like a career; and there was a short period, towards the end of the writing, when I do believe I knew all or much of the book by heart. The labour ended; the book began to recede. And I found that I was unwilling to re-enter the world I had created, unwilling to expose myself again to the emotions that lay below the comedy. I became nervous of the book. I haven't read it since I passed the proofs in May 1961.{{Sfn|Naipaul|1983a|p=128}} </blockquote>

The reviews of the book both in the British press and the Caribbean were generous.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=196}} In '']'', Colin McInnes wrote that the book had the "unforced pace of a masterpiece: it is relaxed, yet on every page alert".{{Sfn|French|2008|p=196}} Francis Wyndham, writing in the '']'', suggested that the book was "one of the clearest and subtlest illustrations ever shown of the effects of colonialism ...."{{Sfn|French|2008|p=196}} In his ''Trinidad Guardian'' review, Derek Walcott, judged Naipaul to be "one of the most mature of West Indian writers".{{Sfn|French|2008|p=196}}

In 2011, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of ''A House for Mr Biswas'', and ten years after Naipaul had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he dedicated the book to his late wife Patricia Anne Hale, who had died in 1996.

===1961–1963: ''The Middle Passage'', India, ''An Area of Darkness''===

{{Gallery
|align=right
|width=130 |File:Eric Williams Trinidad Independence.jpg|Dr. ], the ], invited Naipaul to visit in early 1961 and to write a book on Caribbean history, published as '']''.
|File:Illustrated Weekly of India January 1947.JPG|Naipaul wrote a monthly "Letter from London" for the '']'' from 1963 to 1965.}}
In September 1960, Naipaul was sounded out about visiting Trinidad as a guest of the government and giving a few lectures.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=201}} The following month an invitation arrived offering an all-expenses-paid trip and a stipend.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=201}} Naipaul and Pat, both exhausted after the completion of ''A House for Mr Biswas'', spent the next five months in the Caribbean.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=201}} In Port-of-Spain, Naipaul was invited by Dr. ], ] within the short-lived ], to visit other countries of the region and write a book on the Caribbean.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=201–202}} '']'', Naipaul's first work of travel writing, was the result.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=201}}{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=37}} To gather material for the book, Naipaul and Pat travelled to ], Suriname, Martinique and ].{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=37}}

The book begins with perceptive, lively, but unflattering and gratuitously descriptive portraits of fellow passengers bound for Trinidad.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|pp=37–38}}{{Sfn|French|2008|p=202}} Although he was later criticised for the insensitivity of these descriptions, he stood by his book, claiming it was "a very funny book",{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|pp=37–38}} and that he was employing a form of irreverent West Indian humour.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=202}} Naipaul does not attempt to be detached in the book, continually reminding the reader of his own ties to the region.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=39}} For him, the West Indies are islands colonised only for the purpose of employing slaves for the production of other people's goods; he states, "The history of the islands can never be told satisfactorily. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies."{{Sfn|French|2008|p=203}} As the narrative progresses, Naipaul becomes more sympathetic and insightful, noting that no African names remain on the islands; that slavery had engendered "self-contempt," impelling the descendants of the slaves to idealise European civilisation and to look down on all others; and that the debasement of identity has created racial animosity and rivalry among the brutalised peoples.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=203}} As Naipaul does not see nationalism as having taken root in these societies, only cults of personality, he does not celebrate the coming of independence, though he does not suggest a return to colonial subjecthood.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=203}}

In early 1962, Naipaul and Pat arrived in India for a year-long visit. It was Naipaul's first visit to the land of his ancestors. The title of the resulting book, '']'', was not so much a reference to India as to Naipaul's effort to understand India.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=230}}{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=44}} Soon after arrival, Naipaul was overwhelmed by two sensations. First, for the first time in his life, he felt anonymous, even faceless. He was no longer identified, he felt, as part of a special ethnic group as he had in Trinidad or England and this made him anxious.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=215}}{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|pp=41&ndash;42}} Second, he was upset by what he saw was the resigned or evasive Indian reaction to poverty and suffering.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=217}}{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|pp=42&ndash;43}} After a month in Bombay and Delhi, Naipaul and Pat spent five months in Kashmir, staying in a lakeside hotel, "Hotel Liward," in Srinagar.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|pp=43&ndash;44}} Here, Naipaul was exceptionally productive. He wrote a novella ''Mr Stone and the Knights Companion'', set in London, and based, in part, on his experiences working for the Cement and Concrete Association, and, in part, on his relationship with Pat.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=218&ndash;219}} He wrote a number of short stories which were eventually published in the collection '']''. His evolving relationship with the hotel manager, Mr. Butt, and especially his assistant, Mr. Aziz, became the subject of the middle section of ''An Area of Darkness'', Naipaul bringing his novelistic skills and economy of style to bear with good effect.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|pp=43&ndash;44}} During the rest of his stay, his frustration with some aspects of India mounted even as he felt an attraction to other aspects.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=226&ndash;227}} Gorakhpur, in eastern ], he wrote later, had "reduced him to the early-Indian stage of (his) hysteria".{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=226&ndash;227}} During his visit to his ancestral village, soon afterwards, Naipaul impatiently turned down a request for assistance and made a quick escape.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=226&ndash;227}} But in a letter, he also wrote: "As you can imagine I fell in love with these beautiful people, their so beautiful women who have all the boldness and independence ... of Brahmin women ... and their enchanting fairy-tale village."{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=226&ndash;227}}

Just before he left India, Naipaul was invited by the editor of the '']'', a prominent, established, English-language magazine, to write a monthly "Letter from London" for the magazine.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=232&ndash;233}} Naipaul accepted for a fee of £30 a letter.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=232&ndash;233}} He wrote a monthly letter for the next two years.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=232&ndash;233}} It would be the only time he would write regularly on the contemporary culture in England, his country of domicile.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=232&ndash;233}} The topics included ], ], the ], advertising in the ], and the Queen.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=232&ndash;233}}

===1964–1967: ''A Flag on the Island'', Africa, ''The Mimic Men''===
{{See also|A Flag on the Island|The Mimic Men}}
{{Gallery
|align=left
|width=130 |File:Beach, Scarborough, Tobago, 1947.jpg|A beach near Scarborough, ], similar to the one on the fictional island of Isabella in ''The Mimic Men''.
|File:Makerere University tower.jpg|Naipaul served as writer-in-residence at ] in ], Uganda, and finished his novel ''The Mimic Men''}}
{{Quote box
|width = 13em
|border = 1px
|align = right
|bgcolor =#D0F0C0
|fontsize = 85%
|title_bg =
|title_fnt =
|title =
|quote ="Coconut trees and beach and the white of breakers seemed to meet at a point in the distance. It was not possible to see where coconut turned to mangrove and swampland. Here and there, interrupting the straight line of the beach, were the trunks of trees washed up by the sea. I set myself to walk to one tree, then to the other. I was soon far away from the village and from people, and was alone on the beach, smooth and shining silver in the dying light. No coconut now, but mangrove, tall on the black cages of their roots. From the mangrove swamps channels ran to the ocean between sand banks that were daily made and broken off, as neatly as if cut by machines, shallow channels of clear water touched with the amber of dead leaves, cool to the feet, different from the warm sea."
|salign = right
|source =&nbsp;— From, ''The Mimic Men'' (1967).{{Sfn|Naipaul|1967|p=133}}
}}
Naipaul had spent an overwrought year in India.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=239}} Back in London, after ''An Area of Darkness'' was completed, he felt creatively drained.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=239}} He felt he had used up his Trinidad material.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=219–220}} Neither India nor the writing of ''Mr Stone and the Knights Companion'', his only attempt at a novel set in Britain with white British characters, had spurred new ideas for imaginative writing.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=219–220}} His finances too were low, and Pat went back to teaching to supplement them.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=239}} Naipaul's books had received much critical acclaim, but they were not yet money makers.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=239}} Socially, he was now breaking away from the ''Caribbean Voices'' circle, but no doors had opened to mainstream British society.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=240}}

That changed when Naipaul was introduced to ], at the time the wife of conservative politician ].{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=241–242}} Fraser introduced Naipaul to her social circle of upper-class British politicians, writers, and performing artists.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=241–242}} In this circle was the wealthy ], father of novelist ] and owner of estates in Trinidad, who arranged for an unsecured loan of £7,200 for Naipaul.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=243–244}} Naipaul and Pat bought a three-floor house on ].{{Sfn|French|2008|p=244}}

In late 1964, Naipaul was asked to write an original script for an American movie.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=247}} He spent the next few months in Trinidad writing the story, a novella named, "A Flag on the Island," later published in the collection, '']''. The finished version was not to the director's liking and the movie was never made.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=247}} The story is set in the present time—1964—in a Caribbean island, which is not named.{{Sfn|King|2003|p=69}} The main character is an American named "Frankie" who affects the mannerisms of Frank Sinatra.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=247}} Frankie has links to the island from having served there during World War II.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=57}} He revisits reluctantly when his ship anchors there during a hurricane.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=57}} Naipaul wilfully makes the pace of the book feverish, the narrative haphazard, the characters loud, the protagonist fickle or deceptive, and the dialogue confusing.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=57}}{{Sfn|French|2008|p=247}} Balancing the present time is Frankie's less disordered, though comfortless, memory of 20 years before.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=58}} Then he had become a part of a community on the island.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=58}} He had tried to help his poor friends by giving away the ample US Army supplies he had.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=58}} Not everyone was happy about receiving help and not everyone benefited.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=58}} Frankie was left chastened about finding tidy solutions to the island's social problems.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=58}} This theme, indirectly developed in the story, is one to which Naipaul would return again.

Not long after finishing '']'', Naipaul began work on the novel ''The Mimic Men'', though for almost a year he did not make significant progress.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=248}} At the end of this period, he was offered a Writer-in-Residence fellowship at ] in ], Uganda.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=249}} There, in early 1966, Naipaul, began to rewrite his material and went on to complete the novel quickly.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=250}} The finished novel broke new ground for him.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=250}} Unlike his Caribbean work, it was not comic.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=55}} It did not unfold chronologically.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=77–78}} Its language was allusive and ironic, its overall structure whimsical.{{Sfn|King|2003|p=71}} It had strands of both fiction and non-fiction, a precursor of other Naipaul novels.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=54}} It was intermittently dense, even obscure,{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=77–78}} but it also had beautiful passages, especially descriptive ones of the fictional tropical island of Isabella. The subject of sex appeared explicitly for the first time in Naipaul's work.{{Sfn|Dooley|2006|p=53}} The plot, to the extent there is one, is centred around a protagonist, Ralph Singh, an ]-] politician from Isabella.{{Sfn|King|2003|p=71}} Singh is in exile in London and attempting to write his political memoirs.{{Sfn|King|2003|p=71}} Earlier, in the immediate aftermath of ] in a number of British colonies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Singh had shared political power with a more powerful African Caribbean politician. Soon, the memoirs take on a more personal aspect. There are flashbacks to the formative and defining periods of Singh's life. In many of these, during crucial moments, whether during his childhood, married life, or political career, he appears to abandon engagement and enterprise.{{Sfn|King|2003|p=71}} These, he rationalises later, belong only to fully made European societies. When ''The Mimic Men'' was published, it received generally positive critical notice. In particular, Caribbean politicians, such as ] and ] weighed in, the latter writing, "V. S. Naipaul's description of West Indians as 'mimic men' is harsh but true ..."{{Sfn|French|2008|p=257}}

=== 1968&ndash;1972: ''The Loss of El Dorado'', ''In A Free State'' ===

{{Gallery
|align=right
|width=130 |File:Ugandan kings at Toro ceremony late 1950s.jpg|Four kings of Ugandan kingdoms, from left to right: The ] of ], ], the ], and the ], at the signing of an agreement in ], ], Uganda, between the British governor, Sir ] and the ].
|File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-76054-0003, Leipzig, Kenia-Tag, Gerald Götting.jpg|At "Kenya Day," ], 1960, ], centre, later PM of Uganda, demanded the release of ], the Kenyan nationalist. In 1966 and 1967, Obote would depose all the Ugandan kings, including the Kabaka of Buganda.
}}
<!--{{Quote box
|width = 15em
|border = 1px
|align = left
|bgcolor =#D0F0E0
|fontsize = 85%
|title_bg =
|title_fnt =
|title =
|quote =<p> "Port of Spain was a place where things happened and nothing showed. Only people remained, and their past had dropped out of all the history books. ] was the name of a street; no one knew more. History was a fairytale about Columbus and a fairytale about the strange customs of the aboriginal ] and ]; it was impossible now to set them in the landscape. History was the Trinidad five-cent stamp: ] discovering the ]. History was also a fairytale not so much about slavery as about its abolition, the good defeating the bad. It was the only way the tale could be told. Any other version would have ended in ambiguity and alarm. The slave was never real. Like the extinct aboriginal, he had to be reconstructed from his daily routine. So he remains, existing, like Vallot's jail (of which no plan survives), only in the imagination. In the records the slave is faceless, silent, with an identification rather than a name. He has no story."
|salign = right
|source =&nbsp;— From, ''The Loss of El Dorado'' (1970).{{Sfn|Naipaul|1970|p=325}}
}}-->
Back in London in October 1966, Naipaul received an invitation from the American publisher ] to write a book on Port-of-Spain.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=258}} The book took two years to write, its scope widening with time. '']'' eventually became a narrative history of Trinidad based on primary sources. Pat spent many months in the archives of the British Library reading those sources.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=258}} In the end, the finished product was not to the liking of Little, Brown, which was expecting a guidebook.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=258}} ] agreed to publish it instead in the United States as did Andre Deutsch later in Britain.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=258}}

''The Loss of El Dorado'' is an attempt to ferret out an older, deeper, history of Trinidad, one preceding its commonly taught history as a British-run plantation economy of slaves and indentured workers.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=83–84}} Central to Naipaul's history are two stories: the search for ], a Spanish obsession, in turn pursued by the British, and the British attempt to spark from their new colony of Trinidad, even as it was itself becoming mired in slavery, a revolution of lofty ideals in South America.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=83–84}} Sir ] and ] would become the human faces of these stories.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=83–84}} Although slavery is eventually abolished, the sought-for social order slips away in the face of uncertainties created by changeable populations, languages, and governments and by the cruelties inflicted by the island's inhabitants on each other.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=83–84}}

Before Naipaul began writing ''The Loss of El Dorado'', he had been unhappy with the political climate in Britain.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=270}} He had been especially unhappy with the increasing public animosity, in the mid-1960s, towards Asian immigrants from Britain's ex-colonies.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=270}} During the writing of the book, he and Pat sold their house in London, and led a transient life, successively renting or borrowing use of the homes of friends. After the book was completed, they travelled to Trinidad and Canada with a view to finding a location in which to settle.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=84–85}} Naipaul had hoped to write a blockbuster, one relieving him of future money anxieties. As it turned out, ''The Loss of El Dorado'' sold only 3,000 copies in the US, where major sales were expected; Naipaul also missed England more than he had calculated. It was thus in a depleted state, both financial and emotional, that he returned to Britain.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=84–85}}

Earlier, during their time in Africa, Naipaul and Pat had travelled to Kenya, staying for a month in ] on the Indian Ocean coast.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=253}} They had travelled in rural Uganda to ] on the south-western border with Rwanda and the Congo.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=253}} Naipaul showed interest in the clans of the ]n people.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=253}} When Uganda's prime minister ] overthrew their ruler, the ], Naipaul was critical of the British press for not condemning ] enough.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=254}} Naipaul also travelled to Tanzania with a young American he had met in Kampala, ].{{Sfn|French|2008|p=254}} It was upon this African experience that Naipaul would draw during the writing of his next book, '']''.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=255}}

In the title novella, 'In a Free State', at the heart of the book, two young expatriate Europeans drive across an African country, which remains nameless, but offers clues about Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=91–92}} The novella speaks to many themes. The colonial era ends and Africans govern themselves.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=91–92}} Political chaos, frequently violent, takes hold in newly decolonised countries.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=91–92}} Young, idealistic, expatriate whites are attracted to these countries, seeking expanded moral and sexual freedoms. They are rootless, their bonds with the land tenuous; at the slightest danger they leave.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=87–88}} The older, conservative, white settlers, by contrast, are committed to staying, even in the face of danger.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=87–88}} The young expatriates, though liberal, can be racially prejudiced.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=87–88}} The old settlers, unsentimental, and sometimes brutal, can show compassion.{{Sfn|King|2003|p=88}} The young, engrossed in narrow preoccupations, are uncomprehending of the dangers that surround them.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=87–88}} The old are knowledgeable, armed, and ready to defend themselves.{{Sfn|King|2003|p=88}} The events unfolding along the car trip and the conversation during it become the means of exploring these themes.{{Sfn|King|2003|pp=87–88}}

===1972–1976: Trinidad killings, Argentina, ''Guerrillas''===

{{Gallery
|align=left
|width=130 |File:Jorge Luis Borges Hotel.jpg|Naipaul met Argentine author ] in Buenos Aires in 1972, and wrote critically of Borges in the '']''. Here Borges is shown three years earlier.
|File:Rochester with dying wife from Jane Eyre.jpg|Jane and Roche in ''Guerrillas'' also evoke the title character in '']'' and her employer Rochester, whose deranged ] wife dies at the end of the novel while attempting to set fire to their house.
}}

The short life and career of Michael de Freitas, a Trinidadian immigrant in the London underworld of the late 1960s, who returned to Trinidad in the early 1970s as a Black Power activist, ], exemplified the themes Naipaul had developed in ''The Mimic Men'' and ''In a Free State''.

In late December 1971 as news of the killings at Michael X's commune in ] filtered out, Naipaul, accompanied by Pat, arrived in Trinidad to cover the story.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=295}} This was a time of strains in their marriage.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=300–301}} Naipaul, although dependent on Pat, was frequenting prostitutes for sexual gratification.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=300–301}} Pat was alone. Intensifying their disaffection was Pat's childlessness, for which neither Pat nor Naipaul sought professional treatment, preferring instead to say that fatherhood would not allow time for Naipaul's sustained literary labours.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=272}} Naipaul was increasingly ill-humoured and infantile, and Pat increasingly reduced to mothering him.{{Sfn|French|2008|p=272}} Pat began to keep a diary, a practice she would continue for the next 25 years.{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=300–301}} According to biographer Patrick French, <blockquote>"Pat's diary is an essential, unparalleled record of V. S. Naipaul's later life and work, and reveals more about the creation of his 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 ], ] and ].{{Sfn|French|2008|pp=300–301}}"</blockquote>

Naipaul visited the commune in Arima and Pat attended the trial. Naipaul's old friend Wyndham Lewis who was now editor of the ''Sunday Times'' offered to run the story in his newspaper. Around the same time, Naipaul received an invitation from ], editor of the '']'' to do some stories on Argentina. The ''Review'', still in its first decade, was short of funds and Silvers had to borrow money to fund Naipaul's trip.{{cn|date=January 2024}}

In 1973, Naipaul was nominated for the ] by ] of the ]'s Nobel committee.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://sa-admin.lb.se/assets/a97cceda-c3ff-499c-b248-1c25c91fb23f.pdf/F%C3%B6rslagslista%201973.pdf|title=Nobelarkivet-1973|website=svenskaakademien.se|date=2 January 2024|access-date=2 January 2024}}</ref>

===Later works===
In 1974, Naipaul wrote the novel '']'', following a creative slump that lasted several years.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Smyer|first=Richard|year=1992|editor-last=Kelly|editor-first=Richard|editor2-last=Hassan|editor2-first=Dolly Zulakha|title=A New Look at V. S. Naipaul|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208485|journal=Contemporary Literature|volume=33|issue=3|pages=573–581|doi=10.2307/1208485|jstor=1208485 |issn=0010-7484}}</ref> His editor at André Deutsch, Diana Athill, made minor suggestions for improving the book, which led Naipaul to leave the publishing house. He returned a few weeks later.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Athill |first=Diana |url= |title=Stet: a memoir |date=2000 |publisher=Grove Press |isbn=0-8021-1683-3 |edition=1st American |location=New York |pages=230–232 |oclc=45023335}}</ref> '']'', published in 1979, marks the beginning of his exploration of native historical traditions, deviating from his usual "]" examinations.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Cooke|first=John|year=1979|title="A Vision of the Land": V.s. Naipaul's Later Novels|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23050631|journal=Caribbean Quarterly|volume=25|issue=4|pages=31–47|doi=10.1080/00086495.1979.11829305 |jstor=23050631 |issn=0008-6495}}</ref> Naipaul also covered the ] in ], Texas, at the behest of ], editor of '']'', after which Naipaul wrote "Among the Republicans",<ref>Naipaul, V. S. (25 October 1984), , ''The New York Review of Books''.</ref> an anthropological study of a "white tribe in the United States".<ref name=naipaul-nobel-press-release>{{cite web|title=The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001: V. S. Naipaul (Press Release)|publisher=Svenska Akademien|date=11 October 2001|url=https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/press.html|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121020045122/http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/press.html|archive-date=20 October 2012}}</ref>

In 1987, '']'', a novel in five sections, was published.

In his 1998 non-fiction book '']'', Naipaul argued that Islam is a form of Arab imperialism that destroys other cultures.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Ignatieff |first1=Michael |title=In the Name of the Most Merciful |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/07/reviews/980607.07ignatit.html |access-date=24 January 2021 |work=The New York Times |date=7 June 1998}}</ref><ref name=tnr>{{cite magazine |last1=Ajami |first1=Fouad |title=The Traveler's Luck |url=https://newrepublic.com/article/91328/the-travelers-luck |access-date=24 January 2021 |magazine=The New Republic |date=13 July 1998}}</ref>

Naipaul continued to write non-fiction works, his last being ''The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief '' (2010), written following the author's trips to Africa in 2008–09. The book explores indigenous religious beliefs and rituals, where Naipaul portrays the countries he visited in real life as bleak, and the people primitive.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Forna |first1=Aminatta |title=The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief by VS Naipaul |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/29/vs-naipaul-masque-of-africa-review |work=] |access-date=4 October 2021 |date=29 August 2010}}</ref>

===Personal life===
During his first trip to Argentina, in 1972, Naipaul met and began an affair with Margaret Murray Gooding, a married ] mother of three. He revealed his affair to his wife one year after it began, telling her that he had never been sexually satisfied in their relationship. In Patrick French's biography, Naipaul recounts his domestic abuse towards Margaret: "I was very violent with her for two days with my hand&nbsp;... She thought of it in terms of my passion for her&nbsp;... My hand was swollen."<ref>{{Cite news|last=Packer|first=George|date=21 November 2008|title=A Life Split in Two|newspaper=The New York Times|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/books/review/Packer-t.html}}</ref> French writes that the "cruelty was part of the attraction".<ref>French 2008, p.97</ref> He moved between both women for the next 24 years.<ref name="WaPo_Obit">{{Cite news|last=Smith|first=Harrison|date=11 August 2018|title=V.S. Naipaul, Nobel winner who offered 'a topography of the void,' dies at 85|newspaper=The Washington Post|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/vs-naipaul-nobel-winning-chronicler-of-a-topography-of-the-void-dies-at-85/2018/08/11/55fd72ee-9db9-11e8-b60b-1c897f17e185_story.html|access-date=12 August 2018}}</ref>

In 1995, as he was travelling through Indonesia with Gooding, his wife Patricia was hospitalised with cancer. She died the following year. Within two months of her death, Naipaul ended his affair with Gooding and married ], a divorced Pakistani journalist more than 20 years his junior.<ref name="WaPo_Obit" /> He had met her at the home of the American consul-general in Lahore.<ref>{{Cite magazine|last=French|first=Patrick|date=31 March 2008|title=Naipaul And His Three Women|url=https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/naipaul-and-his-three-women/237069|magazine=Outlook India|access-date=12 August 2018|ref=none|url-access=subscription}}</ref> In 2003, he adopted Nadira's daughter, Maleeha, who was then 25.<ref name="nytobit">{{cite web|last=Donadio|first=Rachel|date=11 August 2018|title=V.S. Naipaul, Delver of Colonialism Through Unsparing Books, Dies at 85|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/obituaries/vs-naipaul-dead-author-nobel-prize.html|url-status=live|archive-url=https://archive.today/20180812024848/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/obituaries/vs-naipaul-dead-author-nobel-prize.html|archive-date=12 August 2018|access-date=11 August 2018|work=The New York Times}}</ref>

Naipaul's brother, ], was a novelist and journalist. Shiva died in 1985 at the age of 40.<ref>Geoffrey Wheatcroft, , '']'', 13 August 2005.</ref>

Naipaul died at his home in London on 11 August 2018.<ref name="nytobit" /> Before dying he read and discussed ]'s poem '']'' with those at his bedside.<ref>{{cite web|last=Lea|first=Richard|date=11 August 2018|title=VS Naipaul, Nobel prize-winning British author, dies aged 85|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/11/vs-naipaul-nobel-prize-winning-british-author-dies-aged-85|access-date=11 August 2018|work=]}}</ref> His funeral took place at ].

==Reception==
In awarding Naipaul the 2001 ], the ] praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."<ref name=naipaul-nobel-press-release/> The Committee added: "Naipaul is a modern ''philosopher'' carrying on the tradition that started originally with '']'' and '']''. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their inherent irony."<ref name=naipaul-nobel-press-release/> The committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the novelist ]:
{{blockquote|Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.<ref name=naipaul-nobel-press-release/>}}

Naipaul's fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the ]. The novelist ] has called Naipaul's portrayal of Africa racist and "repulsive," reminiscent of ]'s fascism.<ref>{{cite news|last1=Greig|first1=Geordie|title=VS Naipaul: You might not like it, but this is Africa – exactly as I saw it|url=https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/vs-naipaul-you-might-not-like-it-but-this-is-africa--exactly-as-i-saw-it-6505873.html|access-date=14 June 2014|work=Evening Standard|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140827040647/http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/vs-naipaul-you-might-not-like-it-but-this-is-africa--exactly-as-i-saw-it-6505873.html|archive-date=27 August 2014}}</ref> ] argued that Naipaul "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting what Said classified as "colonial mythologies about ]s and darkies".<ref>{{cite web|first=Edward W|last=Said|url=http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/caribbean/naipaul/said.html|title=Edward Said on Naipaul|date=1 March 2002|access-date=10 October 2008|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071010132752/http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/caribbean/naipaul/said.html|archive-date=10 October 2007}}</ref> Said believed that Naipaul's worldview may be most salient in his book-length essay '']'' (1962), composed following Naipaul's return to the Caribbean after 10 years of exile in England, and the work '']'' (1964).

Naipaul was accused of misogyny, and of having committed acts of "chronic physical abuse" against his mistress of 25 years, Margaret Murray, who wrote in a letter to ''The New York Review of Books'': "Vidia says I didn't mind the abuse. I certainly did mind."<ref>{{cite magazine|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/01/15/on-vs-naipaul-an-exchange/|title=On V.S. Naipaul: An Exchange|first1=Margaret|last1=Murray|first2=Ian|last2=Buruma|first3=Paul|last3=Theroux|date=8 May 2018|access-date=8 May 2018|magazine=The New York Review of Books|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161027115653/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/01/15/on-vs-naipaul-an-exchange/|archive-date=27 October 2016}}</ref>

Writing in ''The New York Review of Books'' about Naipaul in 1980, ] offered the following portrayal of the writer:<ref>{{cite news|first=Joan|last=Didion|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/7366|title=Without Regret or Hope|date=12 June 1980|work=The New York Review of Books|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050908002638/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/7366|archive-date=8 September 2005}}</ref>
{{blockquote|The actual world has for Naipaul a radiance that diminishes all ideas of it. The pink haze of the bauxite dust on the first page of '']'' tells us what we need to know about the history and social organization of the unnamed island on which the action takes place, tells us in one image who runs the island and for whose profit the island is run and at what cost to the life of the island this profit has historically been obtained, but all of this implicit information pales in the presence of the physical fact, the dust itself. ... The world Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual human endeavour. ... This world of Naipaul's is in fact charged with what can only be described as a romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact ...}}

] wrote the 1984 essay "Naipaul's India and Mine" as a reply to Naipaul's ''An Area of Darkness''.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2004/02/commentary-remembering-indian-poet-nissim-ezekial|title=Commentary - Remembering the Indian poet Nissim Ezekial|first=Salil|last=Tripathi|website=New Statesman|date=9 February 2004}}</ref>

] rejected the central thesis of Naipaul's 1998 book ''Beyond Belief'', that Islam is a form of Arab imperialism that destroys other cultures. He pointed to the diversity of Islamic practices across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.<ref name=tnr/>

==Awards and recognition==
Naipaul was awarded the ] for '']'' in 1971.<ref name="Booker Prize 1971" /> He won the ] in 1983.
He was awarded the ] in 1990.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/books/review/Shaftel-t.html|title=An Island Scorned|first= David|last= Shaftel|date=18 May 2008|newspaper=The New York Times}}</ref> He was also made a ] in the ].<ref>United Kingdom lists: {{London Gazette |date=29 December 1989 |supp=1 |issue=51981 |pages=2 }}</ref> He won the ] in 2001.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/vs-naipaul-dead-died-author-death-house-mr-biswas-nobel-prize-literature-booker-a8488011.html|title=Nobel Prize-winning British author VS Naipaul dies aged 85|work=The Independent|access-date=2018-09-19|language=en-GB}}</ref>

==Works==
{{Incomplete list|date=July 2020}}

===Fiction===
* '']'' (1957)
* '']''&nbsp; (1958)<ref>{{cite web|url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/07/specials/naipaul-india.html?_r=1&oref=slogin|title=A Country Still in the Making|work=The New York Times|access-date=12 August 2018}}</ref>
* '']''&nbsp; (1959)
* '']''&nbsp; (1961)
* '']''&nbsp; (1963)
* '']''&nbsp; (1967)
* '']''&nbsp; (1967)
* '']''&nbsp; (1971) – Booker Prize Winner
* '']''&nbsp; (1975)
* '']''&nbsp; (1979)
* '']''&nbsp; (1987)
* '']''&nbsp; (1994)
* '']''&nbsp; (2001)
* '']''&nbsp; (2004)

===Non-fiction===
* '']'' (1962)
* '']'' (1964)<ref>{{cite news | url=http://www.thehindu.com/books/you-cant-read-this-book/article2953626.ece | title=You can't read this book |first=Hasan|last= Suroor| work=] | date=3 March 2012|access-date=5 July 2015}}</ref>
* '']'' (1969)
* ''The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles'' (1972)
* '']'' (1977)
* ''A Congo Diary'' (1980), published by ]
* ''The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad'' (1980)<ref>{{cite web|url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/07/specials/naipaul-peron.html|title=From the Third World|work=The New York Times|access-date=12 August 2018}}</ref>
* '']'' (1981)
* ''Finding the Centre: Two Narratives''&nbsp; (1984)<ref>{{cite journal|url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n08/dan-jones/the-enchantment-of-vidia-naipaul|title=The Enchantment of Vidia Naipaul|first=D. A. N.|last=Jones|journal=London Review of Books|volume=6|number=8|publisher=LRB.co.uk|date=3 May 1984|access-date=12 August 2018}}</ref>
* '']'' (1989)
* '']'' (1990)
* '']'' (1998)
* ''Between Father and Son: Family Letters'' (1999, edited by ])
* '']'' (2002)
* '']'' (2007)
* ''The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief'' (2010)
* {{cite journal <!--|author=Naipaul, V. S. |author-mask=1 -->|date=January 6, 2020 |title=Grief: A Writer Reckons with Loss |department=Personal History |journal=] |volume=95 |issue=43 |pages=18–24 |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/06/the-strangeness-of-grief <!--|access-date=2020-07-01-->}}<ref>Online version is titled "The strangeness of grief".</ref>

==See also==
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]

==Notes and references==
;Notes
{{Reflist|group=nb}}

;Citations
{{Reflist|30em}}

;Sources
{{refbegin}}
* {{Cite book|last=Dooley|first=Gillian|title=V.S. Naipaul, Man and Writer|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jWMnQmhCwaYC|access-date=30 September 2013|year=2006|publisher=University of South Carolina Press|isbn=978-1-57003-587-6}}
* {{Cite book|last=French|first=Patrick|title=The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul|url=https://archive.org/details/worldiswhatitisa0000fren_q3r9|url-access=registration|access-date=19 September 2013|year=2008|publisher=Alfred Knopf|location=New York|isbn=978-0-307-27035-1}}
* {{Cite book|last=Hayward|first=Helen|title=The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul|url=https://archive.org/details/enigmaofvsnaipau00hayw|url-access=registration|series=(Warwick University Caribbean Studies)|year=2002|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|isbn=978-1-4039-0254-2}}
* {{Cite book|editor-last=Jussawalla|editor-first=Feroza F.|title=Conversations with V. S. Naipaul|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=buHPh2ZkjP8C&pg=PA126|year=1997|publisher=Univ. Press of Mississippi|isbn=978-0-87805-945-4}}
* {{Cite book|last=King|first=Bruce|title=V.S. Naipaul|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uVZzQgAACAAJ|edition=2nd|year=2003|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|isbn=978-1-4039-0456-0}}
* {{Cite book|last=Naipaul|first=V. S.|title=An Area of Darkness|year=1964}}
* {{Cite book|last=Naipaul|first=V. S.|title=The Mimic Men|year=1967}}
* {{Cite book|last=Naipaul|first=V. S.|title=A House for Mr. Biswas with a new foreword by the author|year=1983a|publisher=Alfred Knopf Inc|location=New York|isbn=978-0-679-44458-9|chapter=Foreword}}
** Also: {{cite journal|last=Naipaul|first = V. S.|journal=]|date=24 November 1983b|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1983/nov/24/writing-a-house-for-mr-biswas/|title=Writing ''A House for Mr. Biswas''| volume=30 | issue=18 }}
** Also: {{Cite book|title=Literary Occasions|last=Naipaul|first=V. S.|publisher=Knopf Canada|year=2012|isbn=978-03-0-737065-5|pages=186|language=en|chapter=Foreword to ''A House of Mr. Biswas''|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vCV7IW8-88kC&pg=PT186}}
** Also: {{Cite magazine|last=Naipaul|first = V. S.|title=A prologue to an autobiography|magazine=Vanity Fair |year= 1983c}}
* {{Cite book|last=Naipaul|first=V.S.|title=The Enigma of Arrival|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=709bdvwJKRAC|access-date=28 September 2013|year=1987|publisher=Alfred A. Knopf|location=New York|isbn=978-0-307-74403-6}}
* {{Cite book|last=Naipaul|first=V.S.|editor=Gillon Aitken|title=Between Father and Son: Family Letters|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gL2g5rH_He8C|access-date=19 September 2013|year=2007|publisher=Alfred A. Knopf Inc|location=New York|orig-year=2000|isbn=978-0-307-42497-6}}
** Also: {{cite book|last=Aitken|first=Gillon|editor=Gillon Aitken|title=Between Father and Son: Family Letters |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gL2g5rH_He8C|access-date=19 September 2013|year=2007|publisher=Alfred A. Knopf Inc|location=New York|isbn=978-0-307-42497-6|chapter=Introduction|orig-year=2000}}
* {{Cite book|last=Nixon|first=Rob|title=London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin|url=https://archive.org/details/londoncalling00robn|url-access=registration|access-date=19 September 2013|year=1992|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-536196-4}}
* {{Cite ODNB|last1=Robertson|first1=Jean|last2=Connell|first2=P. J.|title=Wilson, Frank Percy (1889–1963) |year=2004 |doi=10.1093/ref:odnb/36953 |url=http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36953|access-date=27 September 2013}}
* {{Cite journal|editor-last1=Rosen|editor-first1=Jonathan|editor-last2=Tejpal|editor-first2=Tarun|year=1998| title=V. S. Naipaul, The Art of Fiction No. 154| journal=] |volume=Fall 1998|issue=148|url=http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1069/the-art-of-fiction-no-154-v-s-naipaul}}
* {{Cite book|last=Said|first=Edward W.|title=Reflections on Exile and Other Essays|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=merq6HPXPm8C&pg=PA98|access-date=19 September 2013|year=2000|publisher=Harvard University Press|isbn=978-0-674-00302-6|page=|chapter=Bitter Dispatches from the Third World|url=https://archive.org/details/reflectionsonexi00said/page/98}}
* {{Cite book|last1=Visaria|first1=Pravin|last2=Visaria|first2=Leela|editor=Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai|title=The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 2, c.1757–c.1970|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9ew8AAAAIAAJ |year=1983|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-22802-2|chapter=Population (1757–1947)}}
{{refend}}

==Further reading==
* {{cite journal|last=Bayley|first = John|journal=]|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1987/apr/09/country-life/|title=Country Life|date=9 April 1987| volume=34 | issue=6 }}
* {{Cite journal|last=Boxill|first=Anthony|year=1976|title=The Little Bastard Worlds of VS Naipaul's The Mimic Men and A Flag on the Island|journal=International Fiction Review |volume=3 |issue=1 |url=http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/download/13159/14242}}
* {{cite journal|last=Buruma|first = Ian |author-link= Ian Buruma |journal= The New York Review of Books|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/nov/20/the-lessons-of-the-master/|title=Lessons of the Master|date=20 November 2008|volume = 55 |issue = 18 }}
* {{Cite book|editor-last=Chaubey|editor-first=Ajay Kumar|title=V. S. Naipaul: An Anthology of 21st Century Criticism|year=2015|location=New Delhi|publisher=Atlantic Publishers & Distributors}}
* {{cite magazine|last=Chotiner|first=Isaac|title=V.S. Naipaul on the Arab Spring, Authors He Loathes, and the Books He Will Never Write|magazine=]|date=7 December 2012 |url=https://newrepublic.com/article/politics/magazine/110865/vs-naipaul-the-arab-spring-authors-he-loathes-and-the-books-he-will-never-write}}
* {{Cite journal|last=Fraser|first=Peter D.|title=Review of V.S. Naipaul: Man and Writer by Gillian Dooley|journal=Caribbean Studies|volume=38|issue=1|year=2010|pages=212–215|publisher=Institute of Caribbean Studies, UPR, Rio Piedras Campus|jstor=27944592|doi=10.1353/crb.2010.0027|s2cid=144996410}}
* {{Cite book|last=Gorra|first=Michael|title=After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9m6PteVNcPAC|access-date=19 September 2013|year=2008|publisher=University of Chicago Press|isbn=978-0-226-30476-2}}
* {{Cite journal|last=Greenberg|first = Robert M.|title= Anger and the Alchemy of Literary Method in V. S. Naipaul's Political Fiction: The Case of ''The Mimic Men''|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=46 |issue=2 |date=Summer 2000|pages=214–237|jstor=441958|doi=10.2307/441958}}
*] (April 2011). "An Interview with V.S. Naipaul". '']'' (London).
*] (2019). Introduction to V.S. Naipaul's '']'' (])
* {{Cite book|last=Mustafa|first=Fawzia|title=V. S. Naipaul: Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature|url=https://archive.org/details/vsnaipaul0000must|url-access=registration|access-date=19 September 2013 |year=1995 |publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-48359-9}}
* {{cite journal|last=Miller|first= Karl|title= V. S. Naipaul and the New Order, ''The Mimic Men''|journal=]|volume=29|issue=5|date=Nov 1967|pages=685–698|jstor=4334777}}
* {{Cite book|ref=none|last=Naipaul|first=Shiva|author-link=Shiva Naipaul|title=An Unfinished Journey|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xs9yAAAAMAAJ|year=1986|publisher=Hamish Hamilton|location=London|isbn=978-0-241-11943-3 |chapter=Brothers}}
* {{cite journal|ref=none|last=Naipaul|first=V. S.|journal=The New York Review of Books|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1974/oct/17/conrads-darkness/|title=Conrad's Darkness|date=17 October 1974 |volume=21 |issue=16 |url-access=subscription}}
* {{Cite book|ref=none|last=Naipaul|first=V. S.|title=Finding the Center: Two Narratives|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nqpZAAAAYAAJ|access-date=19 September 2013|year=1986|publisher=Vintage Books|isbn=978-0-394-74090-4 |chapter=A prologue to an autobiography}}
* {{cite journal|ref=none|last=Naipaul|first=V. S.|journal=The New York Review of Books|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1987/feb/12/the-ceremony-of-farewell/|title=The Ceremony of Farewell|date=12 February 1987 |volume=34 |issue=2 |url-access=subscription}}
* {{cite journal|ref=none|last=Naipaul|first=V. S.|journal=The New York Review of Books|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1987/apr/23/on-being-a-writer/|title=On Being a Writer|date=23 April 1987 |volume=34 |issue=7 |url-access=subscription}}
* {{cite journal|ref=none|last=Naipaul|first=V. S.|journal=The New York Review of Books|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1991/jan/31/our-universal-civilization/|title=Our Universal Civilization|date=31 January 1991 |volume=38 |issue=3 |url-access=subscription}}
* {{cite journal|ref=none|last=Naipaul|first=V. S.|journal=The New York Review of Books|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1994/may/12/a-way-in-the-world/|title=A Way in the World|date=12 May 1994 |volume=41 |issue=9 |url-access=subscription}}
* {{cite journal|ref=none|last=Naipaul|first=V. S.|journal=The New York Review of Books|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1999/feb/18/reading-writing/|title=Reading and Writing|date=18 February 1999 |volume=46 |issue=3 |url-access=subscription}}
* {{cite journal|ref=none|last=Naipaul|first=V. S.|journal=The New York Review of Books|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1999/mar/04/the-writer-and-india/|title=The Writer in India|date=4 March 1999 |volume=46 |issue=4 |url-access=subscription}}
* {{Cite journal|last=Pritchard|first=William H.|title=Naipaul Unveiled: Review of The World Is What It Is, The authorized biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French|journal = The Hudson Review|volume=61 |issue=3 |year=2008 |pages=431–440|jstor=20464886}}
* Rahim, Sameer (2022) ''. The Booker Prize website.
* {{Cite book|editor-last=Singh|editor-first=Bijender|year=2018|title=V.S. Naipaul: A Critical Evaluation|location=New Delhi|publisher=Pacific Books International}}


==External links== ==External links==
{{sister project links|d=Q44593|c=Category:V. S. Naipaul|n=no|b=no|v=no|voy=no|m=no|mw=no|s=no|wikt=no}}
* directory category
* {{cite web|url=https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-bibl.html|title= V.S. Naipaul - Bibliography|publisher=Nobel Foundation}}
*, by ], a memoir of Naipaul by his editor
* {{Nobelprize}} including the Nobel Lecture 7 December 2001 ''Two Worlds''
*
* {{C-SPAN|91397}}
* {{Charlie Rose view|2470}}
* {{IMDb name|0619740}}
*


{{V. S. Naipaul}}
{{Nobel Prize in Literature Laureates 2001-2025}} {{Nobel Prize in Literature Laureates 2001-2025}}
{{2001 Nobel Prize winners}}

{{Navboxes
{{Man Booker Prize Winners}}
|title= Awards received by V. S. Naipaul
|list1=
{{Booker Prize}}
{{David Cohen Prize}}
}}
{{Authority control}}
{{Portal bar|Biography|Britain|India|Literature}}


{{DEFAULTSORT:Naipaul, V. S.}} {{DEFAULTSORT:Naipaul, V. S.}}
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
]

]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]

Latest revision as of 22:33, 9 December 2024

Trinidadian-British writer (1932–2018)

Sir
V. S. Naipaul
FRAS TC
Naipaul in 2016Naipaul in 2016
BornVidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
(1932-08-17)17 August 1932
Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago
Died11 August 2018(2018-08-11) (aged 85)
London, England
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • travel writer
  • essayist
Alma materUniversity College, Oxford
Period1957–2010
Notable works
Notable awards
Spouses
Patricia Ann Hale ​ ​(m. 1955; died 1996)
Nadira Khannum Alvi ​(m. 1996)
ParentsSeepersad Naipaul (father)
Relatives

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul FRAS TC (/ˈvɪdjɑːdər ˌsuːrədʒprəˈsɑːd ˈnaɪpɔːl, naɪˈpɔːl/; 17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018) was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years.

Naipaul's breakthrough novel A House for Mr Biswas was published in 1961. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1983, and in 1990, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honour. He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.

Life and career

Background and early life

"Where there had been swamp at the foot of the Northern Range, with mud huts with earthen walls that showed the damp halfway up ... there was now the landscape of Holland ... Sugarcane as a crop had ceased to be important. None of the Indian villages were like villages I had known. No narrow roads; no dark, overhanging trees; no huts; no earth yards with hibiscus hedges; no ceremonial lighting of lamps, no play of shadows on the wall; no cooking of food in half-walled verandas, no leaping firelight; no flowers along gutters or ditches where frogs croaked the night away."

 — From Enigma of Arrival (1987)

V. S. Naipaul was born to Droapatie (née Capildeo) and Seepersad Naipaul on 17 August 1932 in the sugar plantation-town of Chaguanas on the island of Trinidad, the larger of the two islands in the British crown colony of Trinidad and Tobago. He was the couple's second child and first son.

Naipaul's father, Seepersad, was an English-language journalist. In 1929, he had begun contributing stories to the Trinidad Guardian, and in 1932 he joined the staff as the provincial Chaguanas correspondent. In "A prologue to an autobiography" (1983), Naipaul describes how Seepersad's great reverence for writers and for the writing life spawned the dreams and aspirations of his eldest son.

In the 1880s, Naipaul's paternal grandfather had emigrated from British India to work as an indentured labourer in a sugar plantation. In the 1890s, his maternal grandfather was to do the same. During this time, many people in India, their prospects blighted by the Great Famine of 1876–78, or similar calamities, had emigrated to distant outposts of the British Empire such as Trinidad, British Guiana, Jamaica, Fiji, Mauritius, Natal, East Africa, Malaya, the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the Dutch colony of Suriname. Although slavery had been abolished in these places in 1833, slave labour was still in demand, and indenture was the legal contract being drawn to meet the demand.

According to the genealogy the Naipauls had reconstructed in Trinidad, they were Hindu Brahmins—embraced from the knowledge of his mother's family; his father's background had remained less certain. Their ancestors in India had been guided by ritual restrictions. Among these were those on food—including the prohibition against eating flesh—drink, attire and social interaction.

(Left) Chaguanas is just inward of the Gulf of Paria coast. County Caroni and Naparima were fictionalised as County Naparoni in Naipaul's The Suffrage of Elvira. (Right) Indian women go shopping in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1945.

In Trinidad, the restrictions were to gradually loosen. By the time of Naipaul's earliest childhood memories, chicken and fish were eaten at the family's dining table, and Christmas was celebrated with a dinner. The men wore only western clothes. The women's saris were being accessorised with belts and heeled footwear, their hemlines rising in imitation of the skirt, and they were soon to disappear altogether as an item of daily wear. Disappearing as well were the languages of India. Naipaul and his siblings were encouraged to speak only English. At school, other languages were taught, but these were usually Spanish and Latin.

Naipaul's family moved to Trinidad's capital Port of Spain, at first when he was seven, and then more permanently when he was nine.

1943–1954: Education: Port of Spain and Oxford

  • Naipaul attended the government-run Queen's Royal College (QRC), a high school, Port of Spain from 1942 to 1950. Shown here are some older students at QRC talking to a visitor in 1955. Naipaul attended the government-run Queen's Royal College (QRC), a high school, Port of Spain from 1942 to 1950. Shown here are some older students at QRC talking to a visitor in 1955.
  • A 1790 aquatint of High Street, Oxford, showing University College in the left foreground. A century and a half later, V. S. Naipaul would spend four years at the college. A 1790 aquatint of High Street, Oxford, showing University College in the left foreground. A century and a half later, V. S. Naipaul would spend four years at the college.

Naipaul was enrolled in the government-run Queen's Royal College (QRC), an urban, cosmopolitan, high-performing school, which was designed and functioned in the fashion of a British boys' public school. Before he turned 17, he won a Trinidad Government scholarship to study abroad. He reflected later that the scholarship would have allowed him to study any subject at any institution of higher learning in the British Commonwealth, but that he chose to go to Oxford to do a degree in English. He went, he wrote, "in order at last to write...." In August 1950, Naipaul boarded a Pan Am flight to New York, continuing the next day by boat to London. He left Trinidad, like the narrator of Miguel Street, hardening himself to the emotion displayed by his family. For recording the impressions of his journey, Naipaul purchased a pad of paper and a copying pencil, noting, "I had bought the pad and pencil because I was travelling to become a writer, and I had to start." The copious notes and letters from that time were to become the basis for the chapter "Journey" in Naipaul's novel The Enigma of Arrival written 37 years later.

Arriving at Oxford for the Michaelmas term, 1950, Naipaul judged himself adequately prepared for his studies; in the judgment of his Latin tutor, Peter Bayley, Naipaul showed promise and poise. But, a year later, in Naipaul's estimation, his attempts at writing felt contrived. Unsure of his ability and calling, and lonely, he became depressed. By late March 1952, plans were made for his return to Trinidad in the summer. His father put down a quarter of the passage. However, in early April, in the vacs before the Trinity term, Naipaul took an impulsive trip to Spain, and quickly spent all he had saved. Attempting an explanation to his family, he called it "a nervous breakdown". Thirty years later, he was to call it "something like a mental illness."

Earlier in 1952, at a college play, Naipaul had met Patricia Ann Hale, a history student. Hale and Naipaul formed a close friendship, which eventually developed into a sexual relationship. With Hale's support, Naipaul began to recover and gradually to write. In turn, she became a partner in planning his career. When they told their families about their relationship, the response was unenthusiastic; from her family it was hostile. In June 1953, both Naipaul and Hale graduated, both receiving, in his words, "a damn, bloody, ... second." J. R. R. Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, however, judged Naipaul's Anglo-Saxon paper to have been the best in the university.

In Trinidad, Naipaul's father had had a coronary thrombosis in early 1953, and lost his job at the Guardian in the summer. In October 1953, Seepersad Naipaul died. By Hindu tenets, it fell to Naipaul to light the funeral pyre—it was the mandatory ritual of the eldest son. But since there was not the time nor the money for Naipaul to return, his eight-year-old brother, Shiva Naipaul, performed the final rites of cremation. "The event marked him," Naipaul wrote about his brother. "That death and cremation were his private wound."

Through the summer and autumn of 1953, Naipaul was financially depleted. His prospects for employment in frugal post-war Britain were unpromising, his applications to jobs overseas repeatedly rejected, and his attempts at writing as yet haphazard. Working off and on at odd jobs, borrowing money from Pat or his family in Trinidad, Naipaul reluctantly enrolled for a B. Litt. post-graduate degree at Oxford in English Literature. In December 1953, he failed his first B.Litt. exam. Although he passed the second written examination, his viva voce, in February 1954, with F. P. Wilson, an Elizabethan scholar and Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, did not go well. He was failed overall for the B.Litt. degree. With that also ended all hopes of being supported for academic studies at Oxford. Naipaul would later say that he 'hated Oxford'.

1954–1956: London, Caribbean Voices, marriage

"The freelancers' room was like a club: chat, movement, the separate anxieties of young or youngish men below the passing fellowship of the room. That was the atmosphere I was writing in. That was the atmosphere I gave to Bogart's Port of Spain street. Partly for the sake of speed, and partly because my memory or imagination couldn't rise to it, I had given his servant room hardly any furniture: the Langham room itself was barely furnished. And I benefited from the fellowship of the room that afternoon. Without that fellowship, without the response of the three men who read the story, I might not have wanted to go on with what I had begun."

 — From, "A Prologue to an Autobiography" (1983).

Naipaul moved to London, where he reluctantly accepted shelter in the flat of a cousin. Pat, who had won a scholarship for further studies at the University of Birmingham, moved out of her parents' flat to independent lodgings where Naipaul could visit her. For the remainder of 1954, Naipaul exhibited behaviour that tried the patience of those closest to him. He denounced Trinidad and Trinidadians; he castigated the British who he felt had taken him out of Trinidad but left him without opportunity; he took refuge in illness, but when help was offered, he rebuffed it. He was increasingly dependent on Pat, who remained loyal, offering him money, practical advice, encouragement, and rebuke.

Gainful employment appeared for Naipaul in December 1954. Henry Swanzy, producer of the BBC weekly programme, Caribbean Voices, offered Naipaul a three-month renewable contract as presenter of the programme. Swanzy, on whose program a generation of Caribbean writers had debuted, including George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, the 19-year-old Derek Walcott and, earlier, Naipaul himself, was being transferred to Accra to manage the Gold Coast Broadcasting System. Naipaul would stay in the part-time job for four years, and Pat would remain the critical breadwinner for the couple.

In January 1955, Naipaul moved to new lodgings, a small flat in Kilburn, and he and Pat were married. Neither informed their families or friends—their wedding guests were limited to the two witnesses required by law. Pat continued to live in Birmingham but visited on the weekends. At the BBC, Naipaul presented the programme once a week, wrote short reviews and conducted interviews. The sparsely furnished freelancers' room in the old Langham Hotel flowed with the banter of Caribbean writers and would-be writers, providing camaraderie and fellowship. There, one afternoon in the summer of 1955, Naipaul typed out a 3,000-word story. It was based on the memory of a neighbour he had known as a child in a Port of Spain street, but it also drew on the mood and ambience of the freelancers' room. Three fellow writers, John Stockbridge, Andrew Salkey, and Gordon Woolford, who read the story later, were affected by it and encouraged him to go on. Over the next five weeks, Naipaul would write his first publishable book, Miguel Street, a collection of linked stories of that Port of Spain street. Although the book was not published right away, Naipaul's talent caught the attention of publishers and his spirits began to lift.

1956–1958: Early Trinidad novels

HMS Cavina, the peacetime Elders & Fyffes passenger-carrying banana boat, shown in 1941, requisitioned for World War II. In August 1956, Naipaul returned on TSS Cavina to Trinidad for a two-month stay with his family.

Diana Athill, the editor at the publishing company André Deutsch, who read Miguel Street, liked it. But the publisher, André Deutsch, thought a series of linked stories by an unknown Caribbean writer unlikely to sell profitably in Britain. He encouraged Naipaul to write a novel. Without enthusiasm, Naipaul quickly wrote The Mystic Masseur in Autumn 1955. On 8 December 1955, his novel was accepted by Deutsch, and Naipaul received a £125 payment.

In late August 1956, six years after arriving in England, three years after his father's death, and in the face of pressure from his family in Trinidad, especially his mother, to visit, Naipaul boarded TSS Cavina, an Elders & Fyffes passenger-carrying banana boat, in Bristol. From on board the ship, he sent harsh and humorous descriptions of the ship's West Indians passengers to Pat, recording also their conversations in dialect. His early letters from Trinidad spoke to the wealth created there during the intervening years, in contrast to the prevailing frugal economy in Britain. Trinidad was in its last phase before decolonisation, and there was a new-found confidence among its citizens. Among Trinidad's different racial groups, there were also avowals of racial separateness—in contrast to the fluid, open racial attitudes of Naipaul's childhood—and there was violence. In the elections of 1956, the party supported by the majority blacks and Indian Muslims narrowly won, leading to an increased sense of gloom in Naipaul. Naipaul accompanied a politician uncle, a candidate of the Hindu party, to his campaign rallies. During these and other events he was gathering ideas for later literary use. By the time he left Trinidad, he had written to Pat about plans for a new novelette on a rural election in Trinidad. These would transmute upon his return to England into the comic novel The Suffrage of Elvira.

Back in England, Deutsch informed Naipaul that The Mystic Masseur would not be published for another ten months. Naipaul's anger at the publisher together with his anxiety about surviving as a writer aroused more creative energy: The Suffrage of Elvira was written with great speed during the early months of 1957. In June 1957, The Mystic Masseur was finally published. The reviews were generally complimentary, though some were also patronising. Still shy of his 25th birthday, Naipaul copied out many of the reviews by hand for his mother, including the Daily Telegraph's, "V. S. Naipaul is a young writer who contrives to blend Oxford wit with home-grown rambunctiousness and not do harm to either." Awaiting his book royalties, in summer 1957, Naipaul accepted his only full-time employment, the position of editorial assistant at the Cement and Concrete Association (C&CA). The association published the magazine Concrete Quarterly. Although he disliked the desk job and remained in it for a mere ten weeks, the salary of £1,000 a year provided financial stability, allowing him to send money to Trinidad. The C&CA was also to be the office setting for Naipaul's later novel, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion. Around this same time, writer Francis Wyndham, who had taken Naipaul under his wing, introduced him to novelist Anthony Powell. Powell, in turn, convinced the publisher of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, to give Naipaul a part-time job reviewing books. Naipaul would review books once a month from 1957 to 1961.

With many West Indian writers now active in England, Caribbean Voices was judged to have achieved its purpose and slated to terminate in August 1958. Naipaul's relations with his BBC employers began to fray. Despite three years of hosting the programme and three completed novels, he had been unable to make the transition to mainstream BBC programming. He claimed later that he was told those jobs were reserved for Europeans. In July 1958, after arriving late for a program, Naipaul was reprimanded by the producers, and, in his words, "broke with the BBC".

With promotional help from Andre Deutsh, Naipaul's novels would soon receive critical acclaim. The Mystic Masseur was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1958, and Miguel Street the Somerset Maugham Award in 1961, W. Somerset Maugham himself approving the first-ever selection of a non-European.

1957–1960: A House for Mr Biswas

Seepersad Naipaul, father of V. S. Naipaul, and the inspiration for the protagonist of the novel, Mr Biswas, with his Ford Prefect

Not long after Naipaul began writing A House for Mr Biswas, he and Pat moved across town from their attic flat in Muswell Hill to an upstairs flat in Streatham Hill. It was the first home in which they felt comfortable. In his foreword to the 1983 Alfred A. Knopf edition of the book, Naipaul was to write:

"I had more than changed flats: for the first time in my life I enjoyed solitude and freedom in a house. And just as, in the novel, I was able to let myself go, so in the solitude of the quiet, friendly house in Streatham Hill I could let myself go. ... The two years spent on this novel in Streatham Hill remain the most consuming, the most fulfilled, the happiest years of my life. They were my Eden."

The book is an imagined version of his father's life as fashioned from childhood memories. The story as it evolved became so real for Naipaul, that he later claimed it had "destroyed memory" in some respects. The protagonist, Mohun Biswas, referred to throughout the book as Mr Biswas, is propelled by the forces of circumstance into a succession of vocations: apprentice to a Hindu priest; a signboard painter; a grocery store proprietor in the "heart of the sugarcane area"; a driver, or "sub-overseer," in a dark, damp and overgrown estate; and a reporter for The Trinidad Sentinel. What ambition or resourcefulness Mr Biswas possesses is inevitably undermined by his dependence on his powerful in-laws and the vagaries of opportunity in a colonial society. His in-laws, the Tulsis, with whom he lives much of the time, are a large extended family, and are caricatured with great humour, and some unkindness, in the novel. There is a melancholic streak in Mr Biswas which makes him at times both purposeless and clumsy, but it also stirs flashes of anger and of sniping wit. Humour underpins the many tense relationships in the book. Eventually, as times change, as two of his children go abroad for college, and as ill health overcomes him, he buys a house, with money borrowed from a friend, and moves into it with his wife and remaining children, and in small measure strikes out on his own before he dies at age 46. According to the author Patrick French, A House for Mr Biswas is "universal in the way that the work of Dickens or Tolstoy is universal; the book makes no apologies for itself, and does not contextualize or exoticize its characters. It reveals a complete world."

The writing of the book consumed Naipaul. In 1983, he would write:

The book took three years to write. It felt like a career; and there was a short period, towards the end of the writing, when I do believe I knew all or much of the book by heart. The labour ended; the book began to recede. And I found that I was unwilling to re-enter the world I had created, unwilling to expose myself again to the emotions that lay below the comedy. I became nervous of the book. I haven't read it since I passed the proofs in May 1961.

The reviews of the book both in the British press and the Caribbean were generous. In The Observer, Colin McInnes wrote that the book had the "unforced pace of a masterpiece: it is relaxed, yet on every page alert". Francis Wyndham, writing in the London Magazine, suggested that the book was "one of the clearest and subtlest illustrations ever shown of the effects of colonialism ...." In his Trinidad Guardian review, Derek Walcott, judged Naipaul to be "one of the most mature of West Indian writers".

In 2011, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A House for Mr Biswas, and ten years after Naipaul had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he dedicated the book to his late wife Patricia Anne Hale, who had died in 1996.

1961–1963: The Middle Passage, India, An Area of Darkness

In September 1960, Naipaul was sounded out about visiting Trinidad as a guest of the government and giving a few lectures. The following month an invitation arrived offering an all-expenses-paid trip and a stipend. Naipaul and Pat, both exhausted after the completion of A House for Mr Biswas, spent the next five months in the Caribbean. In Port-of-Spain, Naipaul was invited by Dr. Eric Williams, Premier of Trinidad and Tobago within the short-lived West Indies Federation, to visit other countries of the region and write a book on the Caribbean. The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America, Naipaul's first work of travel writing, was the result. To gather material for the book, Naipaul and Pat travelled to British Guiana, Suriname, Martinique and Jamaica.

The book begins with perceptive, lively, but unflattering and gratuitously descriptive portraits of fellow passengers bound for Trinidad. Although he was later criticised for the insensitivity of these descriptions, he stood by his book, claiming it was "a very funny book", and that he was employing a form of irreverent West Indian humour. Naipaul does not attempt to be detached in the book, continually reminding the reader of his own ties to the region. For him, the West Indies are islands colonised only for the purpose of employing slaves for the production of other people's goods; he states, "The history of the islands can never be told satisfactorily. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies." As the narrative progresses, Naipaul becomes more sympathetic and insightful, noting that no African names remain on the islands; that slavery had engendered "self-contempt," impelling the descendants of the slaves to idealise European civilisation and to look down on all others; and that the debasement of identity has created racial animosity and rivalry among the brutalised peoples. As Naipaul does not see nationalism as having taken root in these societies, only cults of personality, he does not celebrate the coming of independence, though he does not suggest a return to colonial subjecthood.

In early 1962, Naipaul and Pat arrived in India for a year-long visit. It was Naipaul's first visit to the land of his ancestors. The title of the resulting book, An Area of Darkness, was not so much a reference to India as to Naipaul's effort to understand India. Soon after arrival, Naipaul was overwhelmed by two sensations. First, for the first time in his life, he felt anonymous, even faceless. He was no longer identified, he felt, as part of a special ethnic group as he had in Trinidad or England and this made him anxious. Second, he was upset by what he saw was the resigned or evasive Indian reaction to poverty and suffering. After a month in Bombay and Delhi, Naipaul and Pat spent five months in Kashmir, staying in a lakeside hotel, "Hotel Liward," in Srinagar. Here, Naipaul was exceptionally productive. He wrote a novella Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, set in London, and based, in part, on his experiences working for the Cement and Concrete Association, and, in part, on his relationship with Pat. He wrote a number of short stories which were eventually published in the collection A Flag on the Island. His evolving relationship with the hotel manager, Mr. Butt, and especially his assistant, Mr. Aziz, became the subject of the middle section of An Area of Darkness, Naipaul bringing his novelistic skills and economy of style to bear with good effect. During the rest of his stay, his frustration with some aspects of India mounted even as he felt an attraction to other aspects. Gorakhpur, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, he wrote later, had "reduced him to the early-Indian stage of (his) hysteria". During his visit to his ancestral village, soon afterwards, Naipaul impatiently turned down a request for assistance and made a quick escape. But in a letter, he also wrote: "As you can imagine I fell in love with these beautiful people, their so beautiful women who have all the boldness and independence ... of Brahmin women ... and their enchanting fairy-tale village."

Just before he left India, Naipaul was invited by the editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, a prominent, established, English-language magazine, to write a monthly "Letter from London" for the magazine. Naipaul accepted for a fee of £30 a letter. He wrote a monthly letter for the next two years. It would be the only time he would write regularly on the contemporary culture in England, his country of domicile. The topics included cricket, The Beatles, the Profumo affair, advertising in the London Tube, and the Queen.

1964–1967: A Flag on the Island, Africa, The Mimic Men

See also: A Flag on the Island and The Mimic Men
  • A beach near Scarborough, Tobago, similar to the one on the fictional island of Isabella in The Mimic Men. A beach near Scarborough, Tobago, similar to the one on the fictional island of Isabella in The Mimic Men.
  • Naipaul served as writer-in-residence at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and finished his novel The Mimic Men Naipaul served as writer-in-residence at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and finished his novel The Mimic Men

"Coconut trees and beach and the white of breakers seemed to meet at a point in the distance. It was not possible to see where coconut turned to mangrove and swampland. Here and there, interrupting the straight line of the beach, were the trunks of trees washed up by the sea. I set myself to walk to one tree, then to the other. I was soon far away from the village and from people, and was alone on the beach, smooth and shining silver in the dying light. No coconut now, but mangrove, tall on the black cages of their roots. From the mangrove swamps channels ran to the ocean between sand banks that were daily made and broken off, as neatly as if cut by machines, shallow channels of clear water touched with the amber of dead leaves, cool to the feet, different from the warm sea."

 — From, The Mimic Men (1967).

Naipaul had spent an overwrought year in India. Back in London, after An Area of Darkness was completed, he felt creatively drained. He felt he had used up his Trinidad material. Neither India nor the writing of Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, his only attempt at a novel set in Britain with white British characters, had spurred new ideas for imaginative writing. His finances too were low, and Pat went back to teaching to supplement them. Naipaul's books had received much critical acclaim, but they were not yet money makers. Socially, he was now breaking away from the Caribbean Voices circle, but no doors had opened to mainstream British society.

That changed when Naipaul was introduced to Antonia Fraser, at the time the wife of conservative politician Hugh Fraser. Fraser introduced Naipaul to her social circle of upper-class British politicians, writers, and performing artists. In this circle was the wealthy second Baron Glenconner, father of novelist Emma Tennant and owner of estates in Trinidad, who arranged for an unsecured loan of £7,200 for Naipaul. Naipaul and Pat bought a three-floor house on Stockwell Park Crescent.

In late 1964, Naipaul was asked to write an original script for an American movie. He spent the next few months in Trinidad writing the story, a novella named, "A Flag on the Island," later published in the collection, A Flag on the Island. The finished version was not to the director's liking and the movie was never made. The story is set in the present time—1964—in a Caribbean island, which is not named. The main character is an American named "Frankie" who affects the mannerisms of Frank Sinatra. Frankie has links to the island from having served there during World War II. He revisits reluctantly when his ship anchors there during a hurricane. Naipaul wilfully makes the pace of the book feverish, the narrative haphazard, the characters loud, the protagonist fickle or deceptive, and the dialogue confusing. Balancing the present time is Frankie's less disordered, though comfortless, memory of 20 years before. Then he had become a part of a community on the island. He had tried to help his poor friends by giving away the ample US Army supplies he had. Not everyone was happy about receiving help and not everyone benefited. Frankie was left chastened about finding tidy solutions to the island's social problems. This theme, indirectly developed in the story, is one to which Naipaul would return again.

Not long after finishing A Flag on the Island, Naipaul began work on the novel The Mimic Men, though for almost a year he did not make significant progress. At the end of this period, he was offered a Writer-in-Residence fellowship at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. There, in early 1966, Naipaul, began to rewrite his material and went on to complete the novel quickly. The finished novel broke new ground for him. Unlike his Caribbean work, it was not comic. It did not unfold chronologically. Its language was allusive and ironic, its overall structure whimsical. It had strands of both fiction and non-fiction, a precursor of other Naipaul novels. It was intermittently dense, even obscure, but it also had beautiful passages, especially descriptive ones of the fictional tropical island of Isabella. The subject of sex appeared explicitly for the first time in Naipaul's work. The plot, to the extent there is one, is centred around a protagonist, Ralph Singh, an East Indian-West Indian politician from Isabella. Singh is in exile in London and attempting to write his political memoirs. Earlier, in the immediate aftermath of decolonisation in a number of British colonies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Singh had shared political power with a more powerful African Caribbean politician. Soon, the memoirs take on a more personal aspect. There are flashbacks to the formative and defining periods of Singh's life. In many of these, during crucial moments, whether during his childhood, married life, or political career, he appears to abandon engagement and enterprise. These, he rationalises later, belong only to fully made European societies. When The Mimic Men was published, it received generally positive critical notice. In particular, Caribbean politicians, such as Michael Manley and Eric Williams weighed in, the latter writing, "V. S. Naipaul's description of West Indians as 'mimic men' is harsh but true ..."

1968–1972: The Loss of El Dorado, In A Free State

Back in London in October 1966, Naipaul received an invitation from the American publisher Little, Brown and Company to write a book on Port-of-Spain. The book took two years to write, its scope widening with time. The Loss of El Dorado eventually became a narrative history of Trinidad based on primary sources. Pat spent many months in the archives of the British Library reading those sources. In the end, the finished product was not to the liking of Little, Brown, which was expecting a guidebook. Alfred A. Knopf agreed to publish it instead in the United States as did Andre Deutsch later in Britain.

The Loss of El Dorado is an attempt to ferret out an older, deeper, history of Trinidad, one preceding its commonly taught history as a British-run plantation economy of slaves and indentured workers. Central to Naipaul's history are two stories: the search for El Dorado, a Spanish obsession, in turn pursued by the British, and the British attempt to spark from their new colony of Trinidad, even as it was itself becoming mired in slavery, a revolution of lofty ideals in South America. Sir Walter Raleigh and Francisco Miranda would become the human faces of these stories. Although slavery is eventually abolished, the sought-for social order slips away in the face of uncertainties created by changeable populations, languages, and governments and by the cruelties inflicted by the island's inhabitants on each other.

Before Naipaul began writing The Loss of El Dorado, he had been unhappy with the political climate in Britain. He had been especially unhappy with the increasing public animosity, in the mid-1960s, towards Asian immigrants from Britain's ex-colonies. During the writing of the book, he and Pat sold their house in London, and led a transient life, successively renting or borrowing use of the homes of friends. After the book was completed, they travelled to Trinidad and Canada with a view to finding a location in which to settle. Naipaul had hoped to write a blockbuster, one relieving him of future money anxieties. As it turned out, The Loss of El Dorado sold only 3,000 copies in the US, where major sales were expected; Naipaul also missed England more than he had calculated. It was thus in a depleted state, both financial and emotional, that he returned to Britain.

Earlier, during their time in Africa, Naipaul and Pat had travelled to Kenya, staying for a month in Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast. They had travelled in rural Uganda to Kisoro District on the south-western border with Rwanda and the Congo. Naipaul showed interest in the clans of the Bagandan people. When Uganda's prime minister Milton Obote overthrew their ruler, the Kabaka of Buganda, Naipaul was critical of the British press for not condemning the action enough. Naipaul also travelled to Tanzania with a young American he had met in Kampala, Paul Theroux. It was upon this African experience that Naipaul would draw during the writing of his next book, In a Free State.

In the title novella, 'In a Free State', at the heart of the book, two young expatriate Europeans drive across an African country, which remains nameless, but offers clues about Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda. The novella speaks to many themes. The colonial era ends and Africans govern themselves. Political chaos, frequently violent, takes hold in newly decolonised countries. Young, idealistic, expatriate whites are attracted to these countries, seeking expanded moral and sexual freedoms. They are rootless, their bonds with the land tenuous; at the slightest danger they leave. The older, conservative, white settlers, by contrast, are committed to staying, even in the face of danger. The young expatriates, though liberal, can be racially prejudiced. The old settlers, unsentimental, and sometimes brutal, can show compassion. The young, engrossed in narrow preoccupations, are uncomprehending of the dangers that surround them. The old are knowledgeable, armed, and ready to defend themselves. The events unfolding along the car trip and the conversation during it become the means of exploring these themes.

1972–1976: Trinidad killings, Argentina, Guerrillas

  • Naipaul met Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires in 1972, and wrote critically of Borges in the New York Review of Books. Here Borges is shown three years earlier. Naipaul met Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires in 1972, and wrote critically of Borges in the New York Review of Books. Here Borges is shown three years earlier.
  • Jane and Roche in Guerrillas also evoke the title character in Jane Eyre and her employer Rochester, whose deranged West Indian wife dies at the end of the novel while attempting to set fire to their house. Jane and Roche in Guerrillas also evoke the title character in Jane Eyre and her employer Rochester, whose deranged West Indian wife dies at the end of the novel while attempting to set fire to their house.

The short life and career of Michael de Freitas, a Trinidadian immigrant in the London underworld of the late 1960s, who returned to Trinidad in the early 1970s as a Black Power activist, Michael X, exemplified the themes Naipaul had developed in The Mimic Men and In a Free State.

In late December 1971 as news of the killings at Michael X's commune in Arima filtered out, Naipaul, accompanied by Pat, arrived in Trinidad to cover the story. This was a time of strains in their marriage. Naipaul, although dependent on Pat, was frequenting prostitutes for sexual gratification. Pat was alone. Intensifying their disaffection was Pat's childlessness, for which neither Pat nor Naipaul sought professional treatment, preferring instead to say that fatherhood would not allow time for Naipaul's sustained literary labours. Naipaul was increasingly ill-humoured and infantile, and Pat increasingly reduced to mothering him. Pat began to keep a diary, a practice she would continue for the next 25 years. According to biographer Patrick French,

"Pat's diary is an essential, unparalleled record of V. S. Naipaul's later life and work, and reveals more about the creation of his 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 visited the commune in Arima and Pat attended the trial. Naipaul's old friend Wyndham Lewis who was now editor of the Sunday Times offered to run the story in his newspaper. Around the same time, Naipaul received an invitation from Robert B. Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books to do some stories on Argentina. The Review, still in its first decade, was short of funds and Silvers had to borrow money to fund Naipaul's trip.

In 1973, Naipaul was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Artur Lundkvist of the Swedish Academy's Nobel committee.

Later works

In 1974, Naipaul wrote the novel Guerrillas, following a creative slump that lasted several years. His editor at André Deutsch, Diana Athill, made minor suggestions for improving the book, which led Naipaul to leave the publishing house. He returned a few weeks later. A Bend in the River, published in 1979, marks the beginning of his exploration of native historical traditions, deviating from his usual "New World" examinations. Naipaul also covered the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, at the behest of Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, after which Naipaul wrote "Among the Republicans", an anthropological study of a "white tribe in the United States".

In 1987, The Enigma of Arrival, a novel in five sections, was published.

In his 1998 non-fiction book Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, Naipaul argued that Islam is a form of Arab imperialism that destroys other cultures.

Naipaul continued to write non-fiction works, his last being The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010), written following the author's trips to Africa in 2008–09. The book explores indigenous religious beliefs and rituals, where Naipaul portrays the countries he visited in real life as bleak, and the people primitive.

Personal life

During his first trip to Argentina, in 1972, Naipaul met and began an affair with Margaret Murray Gooding, a married Anglo-Argentine mother of three. He revealed his affair to his wife one year after it began, telling her that he had never been sexually satisfied in their relationship. In Patrick French's biography, Naipaul recounts his domestic abuse towards Margaret: "I was very violent with her for two days with my hand ... She thought of it in terms of my passion for her ... My hand was swollen." French writes that the "cruelty was part of the attraction". He moved between both women for the next 24 years.

In 1995, as he was travelling through Indonesia with Gooding, his wife Patricia was hospitalised with cancer. She died the following year. Within two months of her death, Naipaul ended his affair with Gooding and married Nadira Alvi, a divorced Pakistani journalist more than 20 years his junior. He had met her at the home of the American consul-general in Lahore. In 2003, he adopted Nadira's daughter, Maleeha, who was then 25.

Naipaul's brother, Shiva Naipaul, was a novelist and journalist. Shiva died in 1985 at the age of 40.

Naipaul died at his home in London on 11 August 2018. Before dying he read and discussed Lord Tennyson's poem Crossing the Bar with those at his bedside. His funeral took place at Kensal Green Cemetery.

Reception

In awarding Naipaul the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." The Committee added: "Naipaul is a modern philosopher carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their inherent irony." The committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the novelist Joseph Conrad:

Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.

Naipaul's fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. The novelist Robert Harris has called Naipaul's portrayal of Africa racist and "repulsive," reminiscent of Oswald Mosley's fascism. Edward Said argued that Naipaul "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting what Said classified as "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies". Said believed that Naipaul's worldview may be most salient in his book-length essay The Middle Passage (1962), composed following Naipaul's return to the Caribbean after 10 years of exile in England, and the work An Area of Darkness (1964).

Naipaul was accused of misogyny, and of having committed acts of "chronic physical abuse" against his mistress of 25 years, Margaret Murray, who wrote in a letter to The New York Review of Books: "Vidia says I didn't mind the abuse. I certainly did mind."

Writing in The New York Review of Books about Naipaul in 1980, Joan Didion offered the following portrayal of the writer:

The actual world has for Naipaul a radiance that diminishes all ideas of it. The pink haze of the bauxite dust on the first page of Guerrillas tells us what we need to know about the history and social organization of the unnamed island on which the action takes place, tells us in one image who runs the island and for whose profit the island is run and at what cost to the life of the island this profit has historically been obtained, but all of this implicit information pales in the presence of the physical fact, the dust itself. ... The world Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual human endeavour. ... This world of Naipaul's is in fact charged with what can only be described as a romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact ...

Nissim Ezekiel wrote the 1984 essay "Naipaul's India and Mine" as a reply to Naipaul's An Area of Darkness.

Fouad Ajami rejected the central thesis of Naipaul's 1998 book Beyond Belief, that Islam is a form of Arab imperialism that destroys other cultures. He pointed to the diversity of Islamic practices across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Awards and recognition

Naipaul was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State in 1971. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1983. He was awarded the Trinity Cross in 1990. He was also made a Knight Bachelor in the 1990 New Year Honours. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.

Works

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (July 2020)

Fiction

Non-fiction

See also

Notes and references

Notes
  1. Meaning: vidiādhar (Hindi "possessed of learning", (p. 921) from vidyā (Sanskrit "knowledge, learning", p. 921) + dhar (Sanskrit "holding, supporting," p. 524)); sūrajprasād (from sūraj (Hindi "sun", p. 1036) + prasād (Sanskrit "gift, boon, blessing", p. 666)) from McGregor, R. S. (1993). The Oxford Hindi–English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198643395.
  2. According to Naipaul's authorised biographer Patrick French, Wilson was "a retired professor ... who was renowned for being taciturn and socially awkward." and that Naipaul blamed Wilson for failing him—in Naipaul's words—"deliberately and out of racial feeling." However, according to Wilson's ODNB biographers, Wilson retired later, in 1957, and was, "a master of social graces and a witty conversationalist."
Citations
  1. ^ "The Booker Prize 1971 | The Booker Prizes". thebookerprizes.com. Retrieved 3 August 2022.
  2. Naipaul 1987, p. 352.
  3. ^ Hayward 2002, p. 5.
  4. French 2008, p. 18b:"There was talk of him (Seepersad) becoming a pundit, and he learned some Sanskrit. Soookdeo Misir, ... gave him a basic education. ... by the time he was in his late teens, he had escaped from the likely future as an agricultural labourer in the grim depths of the rural Indian community. He had taught himself how to read and write English, and had conceived the idea of becoming a journalist, a profession that was usually open to Whites and Negroes."
  5. French 2008, p. 19: "In 1929, the year of his marriage, Seepersad began work as a freelance reporter on the Trinidad Guardian, ..."
  6. Hayward 2002, p. 7.
  7. French 2008, pp. 36–37: "Vido spent much of his time at Petit Valley with Pa, who would read to him and sometimes to other children: extracts from Julius Caesar, Nicholas Nickleby, Three Men in a Boat, ... Pa and Vido positioned themselves in an ordered fantasy world derived from European literature ... Aspiration and ambition became the alternative to daily life ..."
  8. ^ French 2008, p. 12.
  9. Visaria & Visaria 1983, p. 515,a: Quote: "A majority of the emigrants were from rural areas and from 'overcrowded agricultural districts' where 'crop failure could plunge sections of the village community into near-starvation'. In fact, there was a strong correlation between emigration and harvest conditions. Acute scarcity during 1873–5 in Bihar, Oudh and the North-Western Provinces provoked large-scale emigration through the port of Calcutta. The famine in south India during 1874–8 also resulted in heavy emigration."
  10. Visaria & Visaria 1983, p. 515,b: Quote: "Most of the emigrants probably left even their villages of origin for the first time in their lives, and they were not fully aware of the hardships involved in long voyages and in living abroad. Diseases — cholera, typhoid, dysentery — were often rampant in depots or temporary abodes for labourers at ports of embarkation and also on ships. Consequently, mortality among the recruits and emigrants was very high. The data on long voyages to British Guiana and the West Indies clearly show that mortality at sea was alarmingly high. Before 1870, on an average about 17 to 20 per cent of the labourers departing from Calcutta port died on the ships before reaching their destination."
  11. French 2008, p. 5: "When slavery was formally abolished across the British empire in 1834 and cheap labour was needed for the sugar-can plantations, malnourished Indians were shipped over from Calcutta and Madras. ... Black agricultural labourers found their wages being undercut. They looked down on the Indians, who had to work long hours in the cane fields, as the 'new slaves'."
  12. French 2008, pp. 23–25:"The three surviving photographs of Capildeo Maharah (Naipaul's maternal grandfather) show him looking distinctly Brahminical. ... He wears white clothing befitting his caste, his shoes are unlaced to indicate that he has not touched leather with his hand, ... This physical evidence, combined with the certainty that he knew Sanskrit, make his claimed family lineage highly plausible. ... Seepersad's antecedents are vague; he never liked to discuss his childhood. ... Nyepaul (Naipaul's paternal grandfather) may have been a pure Brahmin, a Brahmin-by-boat, or he may have come from another caste background altogether. ... V. S. Naipaul never addressed this inconsistency, preferring to embrace the implied "caste sense" of his mother's family, ..."
  13. French 2008, p. 55a: "Hinduism had regulations on all things: clothing, ritual pollution, caste distinction, bodily functions, diet."
  14. French 2008, p. 55b: The Naipaul family were not vegetarian, as most Brahmins are supposed to be; they sometimes ate meat, and treated chicken as a vegetable. At Christmas, they would celebrate with baked fowl, dalpuri, nuts and fruit."
  15. French 2008, pp. 208–209: (caption) Above left: "Vidia with his glamorous sisters, ... Long gone were the days of covered heads and traditional dress for Indian women in Trinidad. Above right: Ma (Naipaul's mother) in heels with an Oxford-returned Vidia, 1956."
  16. French 2008, p. 26: "What Nanie (Naipaul's maternal grandmother) said, went. .... (quoted) 'Nanie believed in the Hindu way of life but the irony of it is, she would help with the churches and celebrate all the Catholic festivals ... She told us that she wanted us to speak in English, not Hindi, because we had to be educated.'"
  17. French 2008, p. 41.
  18. French 2008, p. 30: "Nanie had bought a house, 17 Luis Street, in the Port of Spain suburb of Woodbrook ... This coincided with Seeperdad's recovery from his nervous breakdown, and his success in 1938 in regaining his job as a Guardian journalist. It was decided that the Naipaul family ... would move to Luis Street."
  19. French 2008, pp. 32–33: "The idyll could not last. In 1940, Seepersad and Droapatie were told by Nanie that they would be moving to a new family commune at a place called Petite valley. ... In 1943, Seepersad could stand it no longer at Petit Valley and the Naipaul family moved in desperation to 17 Luis Street.
  20. French 2008, pp. 40–41: "QRC was modelled on an English boys' public school, and offered a high standard of education. ... He enjoyed his classes n Latin, French, Spanish and Science. It was a highly competitive school, with metropolitan values. Caribbean dialect was ironed out in favour of standard English, although the students remained bilingual ...."
  21. ^ French 2008, p. 67.
  22. French 2008, p. 73a: "Vidia thought that the quality of the education he had received at QRC put him ahead of his (Oxford) contemporaries."
  23. French 2008, p. 73b: "Peter Bayley remembers Vidia reading a later essay on Milton's Paradise Lost ... 'I knew I had a winner.'"
  24. French 2008, p. 96: "Peter Bayley had been impressed with Vidia's confidence, ... Vidia, then, was able to adjust and compose himself in a social, formal setting."
  25. French 2008, p. 90.
  26. ^ French 2008, p. 91.
  27. French 2008, pp. 92–93.
  28. French 2008, p. 93: "When Vidia got back to England, he was in a bad state. Trinidad was off. 'The fact is,' he admitted, 'I spent too much money in Spain. And, during the nervous breakdown (yes, it was that) I had, I grew rash and reckless ... My only opportunity of recuperating from my present chaos is to remain in England this summer and live very cheaply.'"
  29. Jussawalla 1997, p. 126: "At Oxford he continued to suffer. 'I drifted into something like a mental illness,' he would write."
  30. ^ French 2008, p. 115.
  31. French 2008, p. 111.
  32. French 2008, p. 118.
  33. French 2008, p. 123.
  34. Naipaul 1987, p. 346.
  35. ^ French 2008, pp. 117–128.
  36. Robertson & Connell 2004.
  37. French 2008, p. 128: "He remained at Oxford, the staff of the college library having given him and administrative job to tide him over."
  38. Rosen & Tejpal 1998: "Actually, I hated Oxford. I hate those degrees and I hate all those ideas of universities. 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. I am not boasting, you know well—time has proved all these things. In a way, I had prepared too much for the outer world; there was a kind of solitude and despair, really, at Oxford. I wouldn't wish anyone to go through it.."
  39. Naipaul 1983c.
  40. French 2008, p. 118:"Pat thought he needed to hurry up. 'If you haven't written in amongst the hurly burly you never will and what you write will never really be good. ...' She advised him not to get into debt, and asked him to send £1 that he owed her. Her affection was undimmed. 'I'm an absolute fool where you're concerned and (not to be told to your enormous ego) I really adore and worship that stupid expression ...'"
  41. ^ French 2008, pp. 155–156.
  42. French 2008, p. 160.
  43. French 2008, p. 161.
  44. French 2008, p. 163.
  45. French 2008, pp. 164–165.
  46. French 2008, p. 165.
  47. French 2008, pp. 167–168.
  48. ^ French 2008, pp. 171–172.
  49. French 2008, p. 173.
  50. French 2008, pp. 174–175.
  51. ^ French 2008, pp. 180–181.
  52. ^ French 2008, pp. 186–187.
  53. French 2008, p. 179.
  54. French 2008, pp. 178–179.
  55. French 2008, pp. 179–180.
  56. ^ French 2008, p. 185.
  57. ^ French 2008, p. 184.
  58. Naipaul 1983a, pp. 133, 136.
  59. ^ French 2008, p. 192.
  60. ^ French 2008, p. 193.
  61. ^ French 2008, p. 194.
  62. Naipaul 1983a, p. 128.
  63. ^ French 2008, p. 196.
  64. ^ French 2008, p. 201.
  65. French 2008, pp. 201–202.
  66. ^ Dooley 2006, p. 37.
  67. ^ Dooley 2006, pp. 37–38.
  68. ^ French 2008, p. 202.
  69. Dooley 2006, p. 39.
  70. ^ French 2008, p. 203.
  71. French 2008, p. 230.
  72. Dooley 2006, p. 44.
  73. French 2008, p. 215.
  74. Dooley 2006, pp. 41–42.
  75. French 2008, p. 217.
  76. Dooley 2006, pp. 42–43.
  77. ^ Dooley 2006, pp. 43–44.
  78. French 2008, pp. 218–219.
  79. ^ French 2008, pp. 226–227.
  80. ^ French 2008, pp. 232–233.
  81. Naipaul 1967, p. 133.
  82. ^ French 2008, p. 239.
  83. ^ French 2008, pp. 219–220.
  84. French 2008, p. 240.
  85. ^ French 2008, pp. 241–242.
  86. French 2008, pp. 243–244.
  87. French 2008, p. 244.
  88. ^ French 2008, p. 247.
  89. King 2003, p. 69.
  90. ^ Dooley 2006, p. 57.
  91. ^ Dooley 2006, p. 58.
  92. French 2008, p. 248.
  93. French 2008, p. 249.
  94. ^ French 2008, p. 250.
  95. Dooley 2006, p. 55.
  96. ^ King 2003, pp. 77–78.
  97. ^ King 2003, p. 71.
  98. Dooley 2006, p. 54.
  99. Dooley 2006, p. 53.
  100. French 2008, p. 257.
  101. ^ French 2008, p. 258.
  102. ^ King 2003, pp. 83–84.
  103. ^ French 2008, p. 270.
  104. ^ King 2003, pp. 84–85.
  105. ^ French 2008, p. 253.
  106. ^ French 2008, p. 254.
  107. French 2008, p. 255.
  108. ^ King 2003, pp. 91–92.
  109. ^ King 2003, pp. 87–88.
  110. ^ King 2003, p. 88.
  111. French 2008, p. 295.
  112. ^ French 2008, pp. 300–301.
  113. ^ French 2008, p. 272.
  114. "Nobelarkivet-1973" (PDF). svenskaakademien.se. 2 January 2024. Retrieved 2 January 2024.
  115. Smyer, Richard (1992). Kelly, Richard; Hassan, Dolly Zulakha (eds.). "A New Look at V. S. Naipaul". Contemporary Literature. 33 (3): 573–581. doi:10.2307/1208485. ISSN 0010-7484. JSTOR 1208485.
  116. Athill, Diana (2000). Stet: a memoir (1st American ed.). New York: Grove Press. pp. 230–232. ISBN 0-8021-1683-3. OCLC 45023335.
  117. Cooke, John (1979). ""A Vision of the Land": V.s. Naipaul's Later Novels". Caribbean Quarterly. 25 (4): 31–47. doi:10.1080/00086495.1979.11829305. ISSN 0008-6495. JSTOR 23050631.
  118. Naipaul, V. S. (25 October 1984), ""Among the Republicans", The New York Review of Books.
  119. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001: V. S. Naipaul (Press Release)". Svenska Akademien. 11 October 2001. Archived from the original on 20 October 2012.
  120. Ignatieff, Michael (7 June 1998). "In the Name of the Most Merciful". The New York Times. Retrieved 24 January 2021.
  121. ^ Ajami, Fouad (13 July 1998). "The Traveler's Luck". The New Republic. Retrieved 24 January 2021.
  122. Forna, Aminatta (29 August 2010). "The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief by VS Naipaul". The Guardian. Retrieved 4 October 2021.
  123. Packer, George (21 November 2008). "A Life Split in Two". The New York Times.
  124. French 2008, p.97
  125. ^ Smith, Harrison (11 August 2018). "V.S. Naipaul, Nobel winner who offered 'a topography of the void,' dies at 85". The Washington Post. Retrieved 12 August 2018.
  126. French, Patrick (31 March 2008). "Naipaul And His Three Women". Outlook India. Retrieved 12 August 2018.
  127. ^ Donadio, Rachel (11 August 2018). "V.S. Naipaul, Delver of Colonialism Through Unsparing Books, Dies at 85". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 12 August 2018. Retrieved 11 August 2018.
  128. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "Sardonic Genius - Geoffrey Wheatcroft recalls his friendship with the writer Shiva Naipaul, who died 20 years ago", The Spectator, 13 August 2005.
  129. Lea, Richard (11 August 2018). "VS Naipaul, Nobel prize-winning British author, dies aged 85". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 August 2018.
  130. Greig, Geordie. "VS Naipaul: You might not like it, but this is Africa – exactly as I saw it". Evening Standard. Archived from the original on 27 August 2014. Retrieved 14 June 2014.
  131. Said, Edward W (1 March 2002). "Edward Said on Naipaul". Archived from the original on 10 October 2007. Retrieved 10 October 2008.
  132. Murray, Margaret; Buruma, Ian; Theroux, Paul (8 May 2018). "On V.S. Naipaul: An Exchange". The New York Review of Books. Archived from the original on 27 October 2016. Retrieved 8 May 2018.
  133. Didion, Joan (12 June 1980). "Without Regret or Hope". The New York Review of Books. Archived from the original on 8 September 2005.
  134. Tripathi, Salil (9 February 2004). "Commentary - Remembering the Indian poet Nissim Ezekial". New Statesman.
  135. Shaftel, David (18 May 2008). "An Island Scorned". The New York Times.
  136. United Kingdom lists: "No. 51981". The London Gazette (1st supplement). 29 December 1989. p. 2.
  137. "Nobel Prize-winning British author VS Naipaul dies aged 85". The Independent. Retrieved 19 September 2018.
  138. "A Country Still in the Making". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 August 2018.
  139. Suroor, Hasan (3 March 2012). "You can't read this book". The Hindu. Retrieved 5 July 2015.
  140. "From the Third World". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 August 2018.
  141. Jones, D. A. N. (3 May 1984). "The Enchantment of Vidia Naipaul". London Review of Books. 6 (8). LRB.co.uk. Retrieved 12 August 2018.
  142. Online version is titled "The strangeness of grief".
Sources

Further reading

External links

Works by V. S. Naipaul
Novels
Non-fiction
Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature
1901–1920
1921–1940
1941–1960
1961–1980
1981–2000
2001–2020
2021–present
2001 Nobel Prize laureates
Chemistry
Literature (2001)
Peace
Physics
Physiology or Medicine
Economic Sciences
Nobel Prize recipients
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
Awards received by V. S. Naipaul
Recipients of the Booker Prize
1969–79
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
2020s
David Cohen Prize
1990s
2000s
2010s
2020s
Portals: Categories: