Nobel winner controversial

Los Angeles Times

V.S. Naipaul, whose life and writings have made him one of the world’s most cosmopolitan and controversial writers, Thursday was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

The 69-year-old writer was born in Trinidad, where his parents had emigrated from India, and has lived in Britain since leaving home for Oxford University in 1950. A novelist and travel writer, he has written acerbic, no-holds-barred books about Britain and various Third World countries.

His best known works include the novels “A House for Mr. Biswas,” “A Bend in the River” and “Guerrillas”; and the nonfiction books “India: A Wounded Civilization,” “Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey” and a memoir, “The Enigma of Arrival.”

A winner of the Booker Prize, Britain’s most coveted literary honor, in 1971, Naipaul was knighted in 1990.

Many critics regard Naipaul as the heir to Joseph Conrad. “Whatever we may want in a novelist,” Irving Howe wrote in 1979, “is to be found in his works: an almost Conradian gift for tensing a story, a serious involvement with human issues, a supple English prose, a hard-edged wit, a personal vision of things.”

Even so, Naipaul’s willingness to speak his mind has made him a contentious figure. He is an unabashed cynic and snob who has called India unwashed, Trinidad unlearned and Britain culturally bankrupt. “Africa has no future” was another famous Naipaul dismissal.

Little wonder that Edward Said, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, notes that in the Third World Naipaul is “a marked man as a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him.”

What remains undisputed is that Naipaul writes from a sensibility of displacement, rootlessness and exile. This quality gives his work a tone that is very urbane and very cold. In his view, this is the mark of the truth-teller, the dispeller of illusions.

“Naipaul writes about the many psychic realities of exile in our contemporary world,” critic Alfred Kazin wrote, “with far more bite and dramatic havoc than Joyce. … What makes (him) hurt so much more … is his major image – the tenuousness of man’s hold on the Earth.”

Late in his career, Naipaul seemed to have turned his back on the novel. He denied that, but insisted it was not necessarily the highest form of literary prose. “Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.” His most recent book, “Half a Life,” to be published this month, is a novel.

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