V.S. Naipaul: Nobel Laureate 2001

The Nobel committee announced on 11 October that the 2001 Prize for Literature was to be awarded to the British writer V.S. Naipaul, 'for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories'. Apparently genuinely surprised at the honour, Naipaul responded, 'I thought I was no longer in the running . . . I thought I had fallen away.' The prize comes with a cash bonus of $943,000 (c. �650,000).

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Q. Who is V.S. Naipaul

A. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in Trinidad of Indian Brahmin parents in 1932. He came to Britain in 1950 to study at Oxford and began to write in 1954, a profession he has followed exclusively ever since with the exception of a few years freelancing for the BBC in the mid-1950s. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, was a journalist, who also published short stories.

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V.S. Naipaul used Trinidad as his first subject and then extended his writings to include India, Africa, North America and the Islamic communities of Asia. He now lives in Wiltshire.

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Naipaul is a cosmopolitan writer, a fact that he himself considers to stem from his lack of roots: he is unhappy about what he sees as the cultural and spiritual poverty of Trinidad; he feels alienated from India; and in England he is incapable of relating to and identifying with the traditional values of what was once a colonial power.

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Q. Is V.S. any relation to Shiva Naipaul

A. Brother. There was a certain amount of rivalry between V.S. and Shiva before the latter's death in 1985 at the age of forty, with some critics rating the younger brother rather higher than this year's Nobel winner.

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Q. What about V.S.'s work

A. The Nobel press release says: 'V.S. Naipaul is a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice. Singularly unaffected by literary fashion and models he has wrought existing genres into a style of his own, in which the customary distinctions between fiction and non-fiction are of subordinate importance. Naipaul's literary domain has extended far beyond the West Indian island of Trinidad, his first subject, and now encompasses India, Africa, America from south to north, the Islamic countries of Asia and, not least, England. 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 his memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.' There you have it in a nutshell...

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Q. And the books

A. The Mystic Masseur (1957), his first published book, and the highly successful A House for Mr Biswas (1961), were set in the West Indies. Naipaul then extended the geographical and social perspective of his writing to describe with increasing pessimism the deleterious impact of colonialism and emerging nationalism on the third world, in books such as Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979), the latter a portrayal of Africa that has been compared to Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

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His travel books and his documentary works include India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), India : A Million Mutinies Now (1990) and critical assessments of Muslim fundamentalism in non-Arab countries -�specifically Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia and Pakistan -�in books such as Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998).

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The novels The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Way in the World (1994) are to a great extent autobiographical. In the former he describes how a landed estate in southern England and its proprietor, with a colonial background and afflicted by a degenerative disease, gradually decline before finally perishing. A Way in the World - an amalgam of fiction, memoirs and history - consists of nine independent but thematically linked narratives in which Caribbean and Indian traditions are blended with the culture encountered by the author when he moved to England at the age of 18.

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Q. What about his comments on Islam

A. He has, even as recently as October 2001, made comments about Islam that compare the religion to some of the worst aspects of colonialism, where the colonised or converted are required to lose their past and jettison their heritage. The Nobel Committee have tried to soften this by saying that, 'What he's really attacking in Islam is a particular trait that it has in common with all cultures that conquerors bring along - that it tends to obliterate the preceding culture,' but there will be some who will see Naipaul's award as overtly political, given the current situation.

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Q. And Sir Vidia's Shadow

A. In Sir Vidia's Shadow (1998) travel writer Paul Theroux painted a highly unflattering portrait of Naipaul, his former friend and mentor, saying that 'he elevated crankishness as the proof of his artistic temperament'. And Theroux isn't the only one to have noted the more difficult side of Naipaul's personality: even the head of the Nobel Academy described him as 'a strong character', though this was cited as one of the writer's virtues.

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Q. Who else has received the Nobel award

A. The first winner, in 1901, was Sully Prudhomme. Other big names to receive the prize have included: Rudyard Kipling (1907), W.B. Yeats (1923), Thomas Mann (1929), T.S. Eliot (1948), Albert Camus (1957), Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), Samuel Beckett (1969), Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez (1982), Toni Morrison (1993) and Seamus Heaney (1995).

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V.S. Naipaul is the first writer of Indian descent to be awarded the honour since the great Rabindranath Tagore in 1913.

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See also the article on the Nobel centenary stamps

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For more on Arts & Literature click here

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By Simon Smith