NAIPAUL, V.S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad)
Trinidadian novelist and non-fiction writer (1932-2018)
A Trinidadian Indian who settled in England in his early 20s, Naipaul identifies exclusively with none of these three communities, and has written about all of them. His early novels (culminating in A House for Mr Bis was) were gentle tragi-comedies, but from the late 1960s onwards his books grew darker. He wrote savage non-fiction about the West Indies, India, South America and the Middle East, a mixture of travel and harsh political and social analysis, and his novels dealt with totalitarian oppression and despair. In a Free State is about cultural alienation: its central characters are an Indian servant in Washington, a Trinidadian in racist London and two whites in a fanatical black-power Africa. Guerrillas is set in a Caribbean dictatorship, A Bend in the River in a new' African country, emerging from centuries of colonial exploitation into a corrupt, Orwellian state. For most of the 1980s Naipaul wrote no fiction, but in 1987 he published The Enigma of Arrival, synthesising most of his earlier themes. Its hero, a Trinidadian writer living near Salisbury, reflects on the way his ambitions and his art have changed as he has grown older, on the nature of friend ship, on the passing of old England' and, generally, on the breakdown of the former order of the world. The book's tone is sombre, mellow and rueful; it seems more like autobiography than fiction. It is a unique and moving work.
A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS (1961) Mr Bisswas is a free spirit shackled by circumstance. He is a poor Hindu in Trinidad, an educated man among illiterates, a good-natured soul who irritates everyone. He marries into an enormous extended family, the Tulsis, and spends the next 20 years trying to avoid being engulfed by their lifestyle, which he finds vulgar and ridiculous. The conflict - critics see it as an allegory about the absorption of political or ethnic minorities -- is chiefly expressed in comedy. Mr Bis was is desperate to escape from the Tulsis' rambling mansion, thronged with disapproving relatives; his ambition is to live decently with his family in a home of his own. Although he succeeds, the book ends ironically and tragically: his victory, the vindication of all he stands for, turns to ashes even as he savours it.
Naipaul's other novels include The Suffrage of Elvira, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, The Mystic Masseur, The Mimic Men, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. His non-fiction books include The Middle Passage (on the West Indies and South America), An Area of Darkness and India: a Wounded Civilisation (two studies, a decade apart, of Indian life and politics) and Among Believers: an Islamic Journey and Beyond Belief (two investigations into the Islamic cultures of the Far East). Miguel Street and A Flag on the Island are collections of short stories. Letters Between a Father and a Son is the correspondence between Naipaul, studying at Oxford, and his father, working as a journalist in Trinidad and nursing his own literary ambitions. The correspondence is brought to a moving conclusion by the elder Naipaul’s sudden death at the age of only 47.
READ ON
The Mystic Masseur
A Way in the World
To the social comedies : Timothy Mo, Sour-Sweet Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies (Shiva is V.S.'s brother) R.K. Narayan, Mr Sampath/The Printer of Malgudi Amos Tutuola, The Palm-wine Drinkard Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters
To Naipaul's political novels : Joseph Conrad, Nostromo Christopher Hope, Black Swan
To The Enigma of Arrival : P.H. Newby, Leaning in the Wind
more :Tags Pathways Themes & Places