CONCEPT – V.S. NAIPAUL, AUTHOR, 1932 – 2018

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CONCEPT – V.S. NAIPAUL, AUTHOR, 1932 – 2018

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• Readability: The greatest literary virtue of VS Naipaul was instant readability. He constructed clear, irreducible sentences, and made them into single-minded paragraphs.
• Greatest of all: Many considered him the greatest novelist of his time. Lurking below the comedy and satire of his early works there are glimpses of the bleak view of human existence.
• Theme: The first of his 14 non-fiction works, The Middle Passage (1962), was a lively if unsparing report on West Indian societies as “half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made” because they lacked the self-knowledge or the will to reinvent themselves in the independence period. He admired journalism (the occupation of his father, Seepersad Naipaul) because it was much better than the novel at keeping up realistically with the changing world.
• Travels: During his extensive travels, the liberties he was to take with language registers and genres, and his ability to evoke different settings, are displayed in In a Free State, a pageant of placelessness that won him the Booker prize in 1971.
• Contexts: In his works, he created palpable geographical, social and cultural contexts in which to locate people, their stories and their emotions; and in all of them, symbolism and ideas of universal import spring unforced out of realistical detail.
• Travel writing: Naipaul was well regarded for his travel books and for innovations in the genre of travel writing, and spoke of valuing them above his novels, an opinion that few readers would endorse. He travelled to the Americas, Africa, India, Mauritius, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and every corner of the earth touched by invaders or colonisers to report on failed states.
• Topics: His topics included imperialism, freedom, emergent nationalisms, religion, revolution, fundamentalism and the colonial mentality. He saw the terror waiting to be unleashed upon the world by half-baked revolutions, mutinies and holy wars, etc.
• Controversial Biography: In 2008, he gave fuel to his critics by allowing an authorised biography, The World Is What It Is, by Patrick French, to publicise bold confessions about his visits to prostitutes, intimate details of his obnoxious behaviour towards Pat and his mistress, Margaret Gooding, and many of the cruelties attending his relationships with them and other people.
• Outstanding: His outstanding work was A Bend in the River, a real novel issuing from a novelist possessed. It is Naipaul’s most frightening presentation of a world without meaning or the possibility of meaning.
• Goodbye: His meaning for the island of his birth, and for the world after the centuries of empires and colonies, “everything of value”, as he put it in his Nobel lecture, was in his books: “I am the sum of my books.” In time, that will be seen as his most appropriate epitaph. Vidia (Vidiadhar) Surajprasad Naipaul, writer, born 17 August 1932; died 11 August 2018).

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