V.S. Naipaul

Sir V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad) Naipaul is a Trinidadian writer born in Chaguanas, Trinidad on 17 August 1932.  Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, he is known for his novels set in developing countries.  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" noting that "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."  However, His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Additionally, he has been criticised for dwelling on some negative aspects of Islam in his works, such as nihilism among fundamentalists.

His personal life was marred by drama and tragedy.  Naipaul's marriage of 41 years to Patricia Hale was marked by frequent infidelities, and he is cited as admitting that his devotion to his writing and infidelities may have hastened her death due to cancer in 1996.  During the marriage, he had a long-term love affair with his mistress Margaret Gooding.  Biographer Patrick French wrote that Naipaul subjected both wife and mistress to regular sessions of sexual and physical abuse.  However, 2 months after Hale's death Naipaul married former Pakistani journalist Nadira Khannum Alvi and abruptly ended his affair with Gooding.  


His first three books are comic portraits of Trinidadian society. The Mystic Masseur (1957) and  Miguel Street (1959), a collection of short stories, are among his first books. His acclaimed novel A House for Mr Biswas (1961), is based on his father's life in Trinidad.  Subsequent novels developed more political themes and he began to write about colonial and post-colonial societies in the process of decolonisation. These novels include The Mimic Men (1967), In a Free State (1971), Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979). The Enigma of Arrival (1987) is a personal account of his life in England. A Way in the World (1994), is a formally experimental narrative that combines fiction and non-fiction in a historical portrait of the Caribbean. Half a Life, was published in 2001 and follows the adventures of Indian Willie Chandran in post-war Britain while Magic Seeds (2004) continues his story.

The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010) is Naipaul's 30th book and 16th volume of nonfiction.  New York Time's book critic Eliza Griswold describes his newest work: "Naipaul is willing to express a new attitude, one of self-doubt. This acknowledgment of human frailty — starting with his own — broadens his observational powers immeasurably. As he sets out to explore what he calls “the beginning of things,” he proves willing to turn his brutally accurate lens back on himself...Naipaul has always revealed a curious admixture of extrovert and introvert on the page. The extrovert enjoys his public political scraps, his voyages and his love affairs — even as he seems to be loathing all three. The introvert demands time for the isolation that reflection requires".  


(Wikipedia), (New York Times), and (Contemporary Writers)