V. S. Naipaul

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, TC (/ˈnaɪpɔːl/ or /naɪˈpɔːl/; born 17 August 1932), is a Trinidadian Nobel Prize-winning British writer known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad and Tobago, his bleaker later novels of the wider world, and his autobiographical chronicles of life and travels.^[2] He has published more than 30 books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some 50 years.

Naipaul was married to Patricia Ann Hale from 1955 until her death in 1996. She served as first reader, editor, and critic of his writings. He dedicated his A House for Mr Biswas to her. In 1996 Naipaul married Nadira Naipaul, a Pakistani former journalist.^[3] Naipaul was knighted in 1989.^[4]

Early Life

V. S. Naipaul, familiarly Vidia Naipaul, was born on 17 August 1932 in Chaguanas in Trinidad.^[6] He was the second child of his mother Droapatie (née Capildeo) and father Seepersad Naipaul.^[6] In the 1880s, his grandparents emigrated from India to work as indentured servants in Trinidad's sugar plantations.^[7] In the largely peasant Indian immigrant community in Trinidad, Naipaul's father became an English-language journalist,^[8] and in 1929 began contributing articles to the Trinidad Guardian.^[9] In 1932, the year Naipaul was born, his father joined the staff as the Chaguanas correspondent.^[10] In "A prologue to an autobiography" (1983), Naipaul describes how his father's reverence for writers and for the writing life spawned his own dreams and aspirations to become a writer.^[11]

The Naipauls believed themselves to be the descendants of Hindu Brahmins,^[12] though they did not observe many of the practices and restrictions common to Brahmins in India.^[13][14][15] The family gradually stopped speaking Indian languages and spoke English at home.^[16]

In 1939, when he was seven years old, Naipaul's family moved to Trinidad's capital, Port of Spain,^[17][18] where Naipaul enrolled in the government-run Queen's Royal College, a well-regarded school that was modelled after a British public school.^[19] Upon graduation, Naipaul won a Trinidad Government scholarship that allowed him to study at any institution of higher learning in the British Commonwealth; he chose Oxford.

Education in England

At Oxford, Naipaul's early attempts at writing, he felt, were contrived. Lonely and unsure of his ability and calling, he became depressed.^[20] In April 1952, he took an impulsive trip to Spain, where he quickly spent all he had saved.^[21] He called his impulsive trip "a nervous breakdown."^[22] Thirty years later, he called it "something like a mental illness."^[23]

In 1952, before visiting Spain, Naipaul met Patricia Ann Hale, his future wife, at a college play. With Hale's support, he began to recover and gradually to write. She became a partner in planning his career. Her family was hostile to the relationship; his was unenthusiastic. In June 1953, Naipaul and Hale graduated from Oxford.

In 1953, Naipaul's father died.^[24] He worked at odd jobs and borrowed money from Pat and his family in Trinidad.

Life in London

Naipaul moved to London in 1954. In December of that year, Henry Swanzy, the producer of a BBC weekly programme called Caribbean Voices, hired Naipaul as presenter. A generation of Caribbean writers had debuted on Caribbean Voices, including George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Derek Walcott, and Naipaul himself. Naipaul stayed in the part-time job for four years. In those years, Pat was the breadwinner in the family.

In January 1955, he and Pat were married. Neither informed their family or friends. Pat continued to live in Birmingham and visited Naipaul on weekends.

At the BBC, Naipaul appeared on Caribbean Voices once a week, wrote short reviews, and conducted interviews. Sitting in the BBC freelancers' room in the old Langham Hotel one summer afternoon in 1955, he wrote "Bogart", the first story of Miguel Street. The story was inspired by a neighbour he knew as a child in Port of Spain. Naipaul wrote Miguel Street in five weeks. The New York Times said about Miguel Street: "The sketches are written lightly, so that tragedy is understated and comedy is overstated, yet the ring of truth always prevails."^[26]

Early Trinidad novels

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.^[27] He encouraged Naipaul to write a novel.^[27] Without enthusiasm, Naipaul quickly wrote The Mystic Masseur in Autumn 1955.^[27] On 8 December 1955, his novel was accepted by Deutsch, and Naipaul received a £125 payment.^[27]

In August 1956, Naipaul returned to Trinidad for a two-month stay with his family. Travelling by ship there, he sent humorous descriptions of the ship's West Indian passengers to Pat.^[28] By the time he left Trinidad, he had plans for writing The Suffrage of Elvira, a comic novella about a rural election in Trinidad.^[29] He wrote the novella with great speed during the early months of 1957.^[30] He copied out many of the reviews by hand for his mother, including one from the Daily Telegraph: "V. S. Naipaul is a young writer who contrives to blend Oxford wit with home-grown rambunctiousness and not do harm to either."^[31] 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 a magazine called Concrete Quarterly.^[32] The C&CA was to be the setting for Naipaul's later novel, Mr. Stone's and the Knight's Companion.^[32] 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 New Statesman's Kingsley Martin to give Naipaul a part-time job reviewing books.^[33] Naipaul reviewed books for the New Statesman from 1957 to 1961.^[33]

With promotional help from André Deutsch, Naipaul's novels received critical acclaim.^[34] 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.^[34] Eventually, the novel would be produced as a film under the same name in 2001.

The Capildeo clan with matriarch, Sogee Capildeo Maharaj, center middle row, maternal grandmother of V.S. Naipaul, with her nine daughters and two sons. They were to be the inspiration for the Tulsis in 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.

For his next novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), Naipaul took for inspiration childhood memories of his father (later he wrote that the novel "destroyed memory" in some respects).^[35] In the novel, title character Mohun Biswas is propelled by circumstances to take a succession of vocations (apprentice to a Hindu priest, signboard painter; a grocery store proprietor, and reporter for The Trinidad Sentinel).^[36] What ambition and resourcefulness Mr Biswas has is inevitably undermined by his dependence on his powerful in-laws and the vagaries of the colonial society in which he lives.^[36] According to 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."^[36]

The book consumed Naipaul. In 1983, he wrote:

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.^[37]

Novels and Travel Writing

After completing A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul and Pat spent the next five months in the Caribbean.^{[39] [40]} As a result of this trip, Naipaul wrote The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America, his first travel book.^[39][41] To gather material for the book, he and Pat travelled to British Guiana, Suriname, Martinique and Jamaica.^[41] In the book, Naipaul portrayed the West Indies as islands colonized only for the purpose of employing slaves for the production of other peoples' goods. He wrote, "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."^[42]

In early 1962, Naipaul and Pat went to 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.^[43][44] 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 been in Trinidad and England; it made him anxious.^[45][46] He was upset by what he saw as the resigned or evasive Indian reaction to poverty and suffering.^[47][48] Naipual wrote Mr. Stone and the Knight's Companion in Srinagar. Before he left India, Naipaul accepted an invitation from the editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, a prominent English-language magazine, to write a monthly "Letter from London" for the magazine.^[49]

Naipaul and Pat spent nine months in Africa, Naipaul serving as writer-in-residence at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. He refused to do any teaching, but finished his novel The Mimic Men during his stay.

Naipaul had spent an overwrought year in India.^[51] Back in London, after An Area of Darkness was completed, he felt creatively drained.^[51] He felt he had used up his Trinidad material.^[52] Neither India nor the writing of Mr Stone and the Knight's Companion, his only attempt at a novel set in Britain with white British characters, had spurred new ideas for imaginative writing.^[52] His finances too were low, and Pat went back to teaching to supplement them.^[51] Naipaul's books had received much critical acclaim, but they were not yet money makers.^[51] Socially, he was now breaking away from the Caribbean Voices circle, but no doors had opened to mainstream British society.^[53]

That changed when Naipaul was introduced to Antonia Fraser, at the time the wife of conservative politician Hugh Fraser.^[54] Fraser introduced Naipaul to her social circle of upper-class British politicians, writers, and performing artists.^[54] 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.^[55] Naipaul and Pat bought a three-floor house on Stockwell Park Crescent.^[56]

In late 1964, Naipaul was asked to write an original script for an American movie.^[57] 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.^[57] The story is set in the present time—1964—in a Caribbean island that is not named.^[58] The main character is an American named Frankie who affects the mannerisms of Frank Sinatra.^[57] Frankie has links to the island from having served there during World War II.^[59] He revisits reluctantly when his ship anchors during a hurricane.^[59] Naipaul wilfully makes the pace of the book feverish, the narrative haphazard, the characters loud, the protagonist fickle or deceptive, and the dialogue confusing.^[59][57] Balancing the present time is Frankie's less disordered, though comfortless, memory of 20 years before.^[60] Then he had become a part of a community on the island.^[60] He had tried to help his poor friends by giving away the ample US Army supplies he had.^[60] Not everyone was happy about receiving help and not everyone benefited.^[60] Frankie was left chastened about finding tidy solutions to the island's social problems.^[60] 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.^[61] At the end of this period, he was offered a Writer-in-Residence fellowship at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.^[62] There, in early 1966, he began to rewrite his material, and went on to complete the novel quickly.^[63] The finished novel broke new ground for him.^[63] Unlike his Caribbean work, it was not comic.^[64] It did not unfold chronologically.^[65] Its language was allusive and ironic, its overall structure whimsical.^[66] It had strands of both fiction and non-fiction, a precursor of other Naipaul novels.^[67] It was intermittently dense, even obscure,^[65] 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.^[68] The plot, to the extent there is one, centres on a protagonist, Ralph Singh, an East Indian-West Indian politician from Isabella.^[66] Singh is in exile in London and attempting to write his political memoirs.^[66] Earlier, in the immediate aftermath of decolonization 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.^[66] These, he rationalizes 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 ..."^[69]

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.^[70] 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.^[70] In the end, the finished product was not to the liking of Little, Brown, who were expecting a guidebook.^[70] Alfred A. Knopf agreed to publish it instead in the United States, as did André Deutsch later in Britain.^[70]

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.^[71] 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.^[71] Sir Walter Raleigh and Francisco Miranda would become the human faces of these stories.^[71] 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.^[71]

Before Naipaul began writing The Loss of El Dorado, he had been unhappy with the political climate in Britain.^[72] He had been especially unhappy with the increasing public animosity, in the mid-1960s, towards Asian immigrants from Britain's ex-colonies.^[72] 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.^[73] 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.^[73]

Earlier, during their time in Africa, Naipaul and Pat had travelled to Kenya, staying for month in Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast.^[74] They had travelled in rural Uganda to Kisoro District on the south-western border with Rwanda and the Congo.^[74] Naipaul showed interest in the great culture, history and traditions of the Baganda people.^[74] When Uganda's prime minister Milton Obote deposed, militarily, the President of Uganda, who was also the Kabaka of Buganda, Naipaul was critical of the British press for not condemning the action enough.^[75] Naipaul also travelled to Tanzania with a young American he had met in Kampala, Paul Theroux.^[75] It was upon this African experience that Naipaul would draw during the writing of his next book, In a Free State.^[76]

In the title novella, "In a Free State", two young expatriate Europeans drive across an African country, which remains nameless but which offers clues of Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda.^[77] The novella speaks to many themes. The colonial era ends and Africans govern themselves.^[77] Political chaos, frequently violent, takes hold in newly decolonized countries.^[77] 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.^[78] The older, conservative, white settlers, by contrast, are committed to staying, even in the face of danger.^[78] The young expatriates, though liberal, can be racially prejudiced.^[78] The old settlers, unsentimental, sometimes brutal, can show compassion.^[79] The young, engrossed in narrow preoccupations, are uncomprehending of the dangers that surround them.^[78] The old are knowledgeable, armed, and ready to defend themselves.^[79] The events unfolding along the car trip and the conversation during it become the means of exploring these themes.^[78]

Writing of Guerrillas

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.^[80] This was a time of strains in their marriage.^[81] Naipaul, although dependent on Pat, was frequenting prostitutes for sexual gratification.^[81] 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.^[82] Naipaul was increasingly ill-humoured and infantile, and Pat increasingly reduced to mothering him.^[82] She began to keep a diary, a practice she would continue for the next 25 years.^[81] 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.^[81]"

Naipaul visited the commune in Arima and Pat attended the trial. Naipaul's old friend Francis Wyndham was now editor of The Sunday Times and 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 and Eva Perón. The Review, still in its first decade after founding, was short of funds and Silvers had to borrow money from a friend to fund Naipaul's trip. Naipaul also covered the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, at the behest of Silvers, after which Naipaul wrote "Among the Republicans," an anthropological study of a "white tribe in the United States."^[83]

Critical responses

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."^[84] The Committee added, "Naipaul is a modern philosophe 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 own inherent irony."^[84] 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.^[84]

His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. The novelist Robert Harris has called his portrayal of Africa racist and "repulsive," reminiscent of Oswald Mosley's fascism.^[85] Edward Said argues that Naipaul "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting what Said classifies as "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies".^[86] Said believes that Naipaul's worldview may be most salient in the author's book-length essay The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after 10 years of exile in England, and the work An Area of Darkness.

Naipaul has been accused of misogyny, and of committing 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."^[87]

Writing in The New York Review of Books about Naipaul, Joan Didion offers the following portrayal of the writer:^[88]

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...

Bibliography

Fiction

• The Mystic Masseur  (1957) – film version: The Mystic Masseur (2001)
• The Suffrage of Elvira  (1958)
• Miguel Street  (1959)
• A House for Mr Biswas  (1961)
• Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion  (1963)
• The Mimic Men  (1967)
• A Flag on the Island  (1967)
• In a Free State  (1971) – Booker Prize
• Guerrillas  (1975)
• A Bend in the River  (1979)
• The Enigma of Arrival  (1987)
• A Way in the World  (1994)
• Half a Life  (2001)
• The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book: And Other Comic Inventions (Stories) – (2002)
• Magic Seeds  (2004)

Non-fiction

• The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America (1962)
• An Area of Darkness (1964)
• The Loss of El Dorado  (1969)
• The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (1972)
• India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)
• A Congo Diary (1980)
• The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad (1980)
• Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981)
• Finding the Centre: Two Narratives  (1984)
• A Turn in the South (1989)
• India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)
• Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998)
• Between Father and Son: Family Letters (1999, edited by Gillon Aitken)
• The Masque of Africa (2010)

See also

• Capildeo family

Notes

Citations

Cited references

Books

• Chaubey, Ajay Kumar, (2015) ed. V. S. Naipaul: An Anthology of 21st Century Criticism. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors.
• Dooley, Gillian (2006), V.S. Naipaul, Man and Writer, University of South Carolina Press, ISBN 978-1-57003-587-6, retrieved 30 September 2013 
• French, Patrick (2008), The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul, New York: Alfred Knopf, ISBN 978-0-307-27035-1, retrieved 19 September 2013 
• Gorra, Michael (2008), After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-30476-2, retrieved 19 September 2013 
• Hayward, Helen (2002), The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul, (Warwick University Caribbean Studies), Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-1-4039-0254-2 
• Jussawalla, Feroza F. (editor) (1997), Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, Univ. Press of Mississippi, ISBN 978-0-87805-945-4 
• King, Bruce (2003), V.S. Naipaul (2nd ed.), Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-1-4039-0456-0 
• Mustafa, Fawzia (1995), V. S. Naipaul: Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-48359-9, retrieved 19 September 2013 
• Naipaul, Shiva (1986), "Brothers", An Unfinished Journey, London: Hamish Hamilton, ISBN 978-0-241-11943-3, retrieved 19 September 2013 
• Naipaul, V. S. (1983a), "Foreword", A House for Mr. Biswas with a new foreword by the author, New York: Alfred Knopf Inc, ISBN 978-0-679-44458-9 
  • Also: Naipaul, V. S. (1983b). "Writing 'A House for Mr. Biswas'". The New York Review of Books, 24 November 1983. 
• Naipaul, V. S. (1986), "A prologue to an autobiography", Finding the Center: Two Narratives, Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-394-74090-4, retrieved 19 September 2013 
  • Also: Naipaul, V. S. (1983c), "A prologue to an autobiography", Vanity Fair 
• Naipaul, V.S. (1987), The Enigma of Arrival, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 978-0-307-74403-6, retrieved 28 September 2013 
• Naipaul, V.S. (2007) [2000], Gillon Aitken, ed., Between Father and Son: Family Letters, New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc, ISBN 978-0-307-42497-6, retrieved 19 September 2013 
  • Also: Aitken, Gillon (2007) [2000], "Introduction", in Gillon Aitken (ed), Between Father and Son: Family Letters, New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc, ISBN 978-0-307-42497-6, retrieved 19 September 2013 
• Nixon, Rob (1992), London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-536196-4, retrieved 19 September 2013 
• Robertson, Jean; Connell, P. J. (rev) (2004), "Wilson, Frank Percy (1889–1963)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, retrieved 27 September 2013 
• Said, Edward W. (2000), "Bitter Dispatches from the Third World", Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, p. 98, ISBN 978-0-674-00302-6, retrieved 19 September 2013 

Articles

• Bayley, John (9 April 1987). "Country Life". The New York Review of Books. 
• Boxill, Anthony (1976), "The Little Bastard Worlds of VS Naipaul's The Mimic Men and A Flag on the Island", International Fiction Review, 3 (1) 
• Buruma, Ian (20 November 2008). "Lessons of the Master". The New York Review of Books. 
• Chotiner, Isaac (7 December 2012). "V.S. Naipaul on the Arab Spring, Authors He Loathes, and the Books He Will Never Write". The New Republic. 
• Fraser, Peter D. (2010), "Review of V.S. Naipaul: Man and Writer by Gillian Dooley", Caribbean Studies, Institute of Caribbean Studies, UPR, Rio Piedras Campus, 38 (1): 212–215, doi:10.1353/crb.2010.0027, JSTOR 27944592 
• Greenberg, Robert M. (Summer 2000), "Anger and the Alchemy of Literary Method in V. S. Naipaul's Political Fiction: The Case of The Mimic Men", Twentieth Century Literature, 46 (2): 214–237, doi:10.2307/441958, JSTOR 441958 
• Marnham, Patrick (April 1994). "An Interview with VS Naipaul". Literary Review. 
• Naipaul, V. S. (17 October 1974). "Conrad's Darkness". The New York Review of Books. 
• Miller, Karl (Nov 1967). "V. S. Naipaul and the New Order, The Mimic Men". The Kenyon Review. 29 (5): 685–698. JSTOR 4334777. 
• Naipaul, V. S. (12 February 1987). "The Ceremony of Farewell". The New York Review of Books. 
• Naipaul, V. S. (23 April 1987). "On Being a Writer". The New York Review of Books. 
• Naipaul, V. S. (31 January 1991). "Our Universal Civilization". The New York Review of Books. 
• Naipaul, V. S. (12 May 1994). "A Way in the World". The New York Review of Books. 
• Naipaul, V. S. (18 February 1999a). "Reading and Writing". The New York Review of Books. 
• Naipaul, V. S. (4 March 1999). "The Writer in India". The New York Review of Books. 
• Pritchard, William H. (2008), "Naipaul Unveiled: Review of The World Is What It Is, The authorized biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French", The Hudson Review, 61 (3): 431–440, JSTOR 20464886 
• Robertson, Jean; Connell, P. J. (rev) (2004), "Wilson, Frank Percy (1889–1963)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, retrieved 27 September 2013 
• Rosen, Jonathan (editor); Tejpal, Tarun (editor) (1998), "V. S. Naipaul, The Art of Fiction No. 154", The Paris Review. 
• Visaria, Pravin; Visaria, Leela (1983), "Population (1757–1947)", in Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai, The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 2, c.1757–c.1970, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-22802-2 

External links

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• Nobel Lecture: Two Worlds at NobelPrize.org
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• V. S. Naipaul on Charlie Rose
• V. S. Naipaul at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about V. S. Naipaul in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Awards received by V. S. Naipaul
Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1901–1925 1901 Sully Prudhomme 1902 Theodor Mommsen 1903 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1904 Frédéric Mistral / José Echegaray 1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz 1906 Giosuè Carducci 1907 Rudyard Kipling 1908 Rudolf Eucken 1909 Selma Lagerlöf 1910 Paul Heyse 1911 Maurice Maeterlinck 1912 Gerhart Hauptmann 1913 Rabindranath Tagore 1914 1915 Romain Rolland 1916 Verner von Heidenstam 1917 Karl Gjellerup / Henrik Pontoppidan 1918 1919 Carl Spitteler 1920 Knut Hamsun 1921 Anatole France 1922 Jacinto Benavente 1923 W. B. Yeats 1924 Władysław Reymont 1925 George Bernard Shaw 1926–1950 1926 Grazia Deledda 1927 Henri Bergson 1928 Sigrid Undset 1929 Thomas Mann 1930 Sinclair Lewis 1931 Erik Axel Karlfeldt 1932 John Galsworthy 1933 Ivan Bunin 1934 Luigi Pirandello 1935 1936 Eugene O'Neill 1937 Roger Martin du Gard 1938 Pearl S. Buck 1939 Frans Eemil Sillanpää 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 Johannes V. Jensen 1945 Gabriela Mistral 1946 Hermann Hesse 1947 André Gide 1948 T. S. Eliot 1949 William Faulkner 1950 Bertrand Russell 1951–1975 1951 Pär Lagerkvist 1952 François Mauriac 1953 Winston Churchill 1954 Ernest Hemingway 1955 Halldór Laxness 1956 Juan Ramón Jiménez 1957 Albert Camus 1958 Boris Pasternak 1959 Salvatore Quasimodo 1960 Saint-John Perse 1961 Ivo Andrić 1962 John Steinbeck 1963 Giorgos Seferis 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre (declined award) 1965 Mikhail Sholokhov 1966 Shmuel Yosef Agnon / Nelly Sachs 1967 Miguel Ángel Asturias 1968 Yasunari Kawabata 1969 Samuel Beckett 1970 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1971 Pablo Neruda 1972 Heinrich Böll 1973 Patrick White 1974 Eyvind Johnson / Harry Martinson 1975 Eugenio Montale 1976–2000 1976 Saul Bellow 1977 Vicente Aleixandre 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer 1979 Odysseas Elytis 1980 Czesław Miłosz 1981 Elias Canetti 1982 Gabriel García Márquez 1983 William Golding 1984 Jaroslav Seifert 1985 Claude Simon 1986 Wole Soyinka 1987 Joseph Brodsky 1988 Naguib Mahfouz 1989 Camilo José Cela 1990 Octavio Paz 1991 Nadine Gordimer 1992 Derek Walcott 1993 Toni Morrison 1994 Kenzaburō Ōe 1995 Seamus Heaney 1996 Wisława Szymborska 1997 Dario Fo 1998 José Saramago 1999 Günter Grass 2000 Gao Xingjian 2001–present 2001 V. S. Naipaul 2002 Imre Kertész 2003 J. M. Coetzee 2004 Elfriede Jelinek 2005 Harold Pinter 2006 Orhan Pamuk 2007 Doris Lessing 2008 J. M. G. Le Clézio 2009 Herta Müller 2010 Mario Vargas Llosa 2011 Tomas Tranströmer 2012 Mo Yan 2013 Alice Munro 2014 Patrick Modiano 2015 Svetlana Alexievich 2016 Bob Dylan 2001 Nobel Prize laureates Chemistry William Standish Knowles (United States) Ryōji Noyori (Japan) Karl Barry Sharpless (United States) Literature V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad & Tobago/United Kingdom) Peace United Nations Kofi Annan (Ghana) Physics Eric Allin Cornell (United States) Wolfgang Ketterle (Germany) Carl Wieman (United States) Physiology or Medicine Leland H. Hartwell (United States) Tim Hunt (United Kingdom) Paul Nurse (United Kingdom) Economic Sciences George Akerlof (United States) Michael Spence (United States) Joseph Stiglitz (United States) Nobel Prize recipients 1990 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 2000 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Recipients of the Booker Prize List of winners and shortlisted authors Booker of Bookers The Best of the Booker Man Booker International Prize P. H. Newby (1969) Bernice Rubens (1970) J. G. Farrell (Lost Man Booker Prize, 1970) V. S. Naipaul (1971) John Berger (1972) J. G. Farrell (1973) Nadine Gordimer / Stanley Middleton (1974) Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975) David Storey (1976) Paul Scott (1977) Iris Murdoch (1978) Penelope Fitzgerald (1979) William Golding (1980) Salman Rushdie (1981) Thomas Keneally (1982) J. M. Coetzee (1983) Anita Brookner (1984) Keri Hulme (1985) Kingsley Amis (1986) Penelope Lively (1987) Peter Carey (1988) Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) A. S. Byatt (1990) Ben Okri (1991) Michael Ondaatje / Barry Unsworth (1992) Roddy Doyle (1993) James Kelman (1994) Pat Barker (1995) Graham Swift (1996) Arundhati Roy (1997) Ian McEwan (1998) J. M. Coetzee (1999) Margaret Atwood (2000) Peter Carey (2001) Yann Martel (2002) DBC Pierre (2003) Alan Hollinghurst (2004) John Banville (2005) Kiran Desai (2006) Anne Enright (2007) Aravind Adiga (2008) Hilary Mantel (2009) Howard Jacobson (2010) Julian Barnes (2011) Hilary Mantel (2012) Eleanor Catton (2013) Richard Flanagan (2014) Marlon James (2015) Paul Beatty (2016) David Cohen Prize 1990s V. S. Naipaul (1993) Harold Pinter (1995) Muriel Spark (1997) William Trevor (1999) 2000s Doris Lessing (2001) Beryl Bainbridge and Thom Gunn (2003) Michael Holroyd (2005) Derek Mahon (2007) Seamus Heaney (2009) 2010s Julian Barnes (2011) Hilary Mantel (2013) Tony Harrison (2015)