Vs naipaul

Sir V. S. Naipaul was in mourning for the death of his cat. Augustus was old, in feline years, and had been exhibiting symptoms of senility. On the eve of his death he had wandered into a distant field where he had been kicked in the head by a fractious heifer. Returning home punch-drunk, he was rushed to the local veterinary hospital by the housemaid at the Naipauls’ home, in rural Wiltshire. Pentobarbital was administered to put an end to his pain. I had come to stay for a weekend at the beginning of October, 2011, to find the household in a state of bereavement. The Naipauls’ housemaid told me that Sir Vidia had asked her to repeat, over and over again, her memories of Augustus’s final moments: “Did he mew for milk? Was he purring as the doctor approached with the needle? Did he die quickly?” “Each time I told him only what I thought he wanted to hear,” she said. “The atmosphere of grieving has made life at Dairy Cottage intolerable.” Nine years had elapsed since I first visited Sir Vidia at Dairy Cottage. The initial visit had not been my idea. I had received a telephone call on a weekend at my home in Somerset, quite out of the blue, from Sir Vidia’s wife, Nadira: I told my guests I was sorry to abandon them, but one of the world’s greatest living writers had something important to say to me. Five minutes later the telephone rang again. “Vidia says you are to be here early. He has much to say. Be here by 11.” The call ended as abruptly as it had begun. I told my guest...

Over the years, I have kept coming back to an image: a young writer, a twenty-six-year-old Indian man, sits at a desk in a small flat in Streatham Hill, a modest area of South London. It is 1958, and he is working on a long book that will become, in time, one of the great novels of the twentieth century. The young writer is unimaginably confident and unimaginably vulnerable: privileged in some respects (he went to Oxford, and he knows that he is more talented than his literary peers), utterly powerless in others (he is an Indian at work in the old, disdainful imperial metropolis, but he is not even from India—he grew up in Trinidad, where his grandfather was brought over as an indentured laborer to work on the sugarcane plantations). This is the first extraordinary fact about “A House for Mr. Biswas,” the masterwork by V. S. Naipaul, who died on Saturday, at eighty-five. This book, so full of comedy and pathos, uncanny wisdom and painful compassion, containing a comprehension both of human motive and of a society’s dynamic that might take most writers a lifetime to achieve, was written by a man in his mid- to late twenties. (The only comparable achievement that comes to mind is “Buddenbrooks,” published when Thomas Mann was twenty-six; Cervantes was probably around fifty-five when the first part of “Don Quixote” appeared.) The young Vidia Naipaul’s compassion—a quality that apparently dried up as he aged—was brought to bear on the life of his father, Seepersad Naipaul, the...

V.S. Naipaul, the award-winning writer born in Trinidad who settled in England and wrote an astonishing number of great novels and searing works of nonfiction, The Mystic Masseur, and a number of short stories about Trinidad in the late 1950s, he began writing the books that, with their near flawless prose and withering insights, would ensure his reputation as one of the most important writers of the 20 th century. This is despite the fact that many of his accounts of foreign countries were unreliable, his cruelty and bigotry palpable, his reading of history often simplistic. What follows is a short guide to some of his best, most vital work, and some of the great work written about him. A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) Naipaul published The Mystic Masseur in 1957, but A House for Mr. Biswas is his first truly brilliant novel. This fictionalized account of the life of his father, who worked as a journalist in Trinidad, is one of the great novels of the 20 th century: hilarious, sad, moving, and—for perhaps the very last time in Naipaul’s career—loving. An Area of Darkness (1964) The first of Naipaul’s three nonfiction books about India, Area cannot be trusted as history or sociology. But this account of Naipaul’s early visit to the homeland of his ancestors is a stunning piece of writing that viscerally captures the way that a foreigner in India can feel overwhelmed and panicked after initially arriving in the country. In Naipaul’s case, it was clearly connected to his sense ...

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is an eminent Trinidad-born English writer, who also happens to share Indian heritage. He is famous for his early comic writings and later solemn and autobiographical works. He authored over thirty books, under both fiction and non-fiction genre, in his fifty years of journey as a writer. Born on August 17, 1932, in a town of Chaguanas in Trinidad, he was the son of Brahmin parents; Droapatie and Seepersad Naipaul. His father was an English-language journalist who contributed short stories to the Trinidad Guardian. Naipul’s family relocated to the capital, Port of Spain, when he was seven. It was the encouragement and constant support of his father that he pursued a career in writing. However, before he could achieve success, his father passed away in 1953 leaving him a letter that later proved to be an impetus for his journey as a writer. He made his first attempt at novel writing at the age of 18 but faced difficulties finding a willing publisher. Naipul received his education from an urban high performing school, Queen’s Royal College. Afterwards, he won Trinidad Government scholarship which allowed him to study abroad. Hence, he enrolled himself at the Oxford to study a degree course in English. Following his enrollment, Naipul felt being haunted by the idea that he was ill-adept at writing. He reacted impulsively and took a trip to Spain which he explained to his family as a nervous breakdown. His condition deteriorated and he even tried ...

V.S. Naipaul V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932 and emigrated to England in 1950, when he won a scholarship to University College, Oxford. He is the author of many novels, including A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and In a Free State, which won the Booker Prize. He has also written several nonfiction works based on his travels, including India: A Million Mutinies Now and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples. He was knighted in 1990 and in 1993 was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

sprite-icon-arrow-left sprite-icon-booker-prize sprite-icon-caret-down sprite-icon-caret-right sprite-icon-cart sprite-icon-chevron-down sprite-icon-chevron-right sprite-icon-close sprite-icon-down-arrow sprite-icon-expand sprite-icon-facebook sprite-icon-hamburger sprite-icon-instagram sprite-icon-linkedin sprite-icon-magnify sprite-icon-mail sprite-icon-pause sprite-icon-play-filled sprite-icon-play sprite-icon-plus sprite-icon-pound sprite-icon-quote sprite-icon-search sprite-icon-sound sprite-icon-tiktok sprite-icon-triangle-right sprite-icon-twitter sprite-icon-up-arrow sprite-icon-vimeo sprite-icon-youtube Skip to main content When a great writer dies, so does their mystique. Previously muttered complaints about inflated reputations and unpleasant personal traits are brought into the open. (A scandalous biography helps.) But when V.S. Naipaul died in 2018 the work had already been done. Naipaul was best known as a snob, always keen to dismiss modern England or lament the dark failure of Africa. Derek Walcott, who once admired his fiction as much as Naipaul did Walcott’s early poems, composed a satire called ‘The Mongoose’: ‘Each studied phrase is poison, / Since he has made that sneering style a prison.’ His old friend Sir Vidia’s Shadow, that depicted him, in Theroux’s words, as ‘a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain.’ In 2008, Patrick French’s authorised biography exposed his mistreatment of his first wife Patricia Hale, and the sexual sadism...