V.S. Naipaul Receives Nobel for Literature

By MARJORIE MILLER

Oct. 12, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

LONDON —

V.S. Naipaul, a master of prose and controversial interpreter of the developing world, won the centenary Nobel Prize for literature Thursday for “works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.”

A perennial outsider, Naipaul, 69, was born on the island of Trinidad to parents of Indian descent and moved to Britain more than 50 years ago. He writes in English about what he has called “half-made” societies in the Caribbean, India, Africa and Asia.

He is “a literary navigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice,” said the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize.

The academy called the sometimes prickly writer the heir to Joseph Conrad “as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings.”

His style, however, is his own. The academy singled out his highly autobiographical novel, “The Enigma of Arrival,” about a young Indian from Trinidad in England, as a masterpiece.

“Naipaul visits the reality of England like an anthropologist studying some hitherto unexplored native tribe deep in the jungle,” the academy said. In it, he portrays “the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture.”

But it is his portrayal of some of the world’s old colonies--unexplored by many Westerners--that has earned Naipaul the most criticism throughout his career.

The academy avoided mention of some of Naipaul’s more contentious works, such as his critique of Islamic fundamentalism, “Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey,” published in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution. One reviewer said the book ravaged the religion with naked antipathy.

Horace Engdahl, head of the academy, acknowledged that the choice of Naipaul might be regarded as political in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and subsequent U.S.-British retaliation.

“I don’t think we will have violent protests from the Islamic countries,” Engdahl said in Stockholm, “and if they take the care to read his travel books from that part of the world, they will realize that his view of Islam is a lot more nuanced.”

In his other travelogue through non-Arab Islamic countries, “Beyond Belief,” the academy said, “the author’s empathy finds expression in the acuity of his ear.”

He may have an ear for beautiful language and dialogue, but Naipaul has eyes like a basset hound’s that telegraph sadness, or a lack of peace.

Naipaul is a testy character almost as well known for his squabbles and unprovoked attacks on other authors as for his work. He denounced the novel as an art form before writing another one, published just last month. He has been celebrated, rewarded and knighted, and yet he can be so ornery that one profile of him in the Independent newspaper last month asked, “What’s eating the man, and who does he think he is?”

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was the second of seven children born to Hindu parents in the Trinidadian town of Chaguanas. His mother was descended from the Brahmin caste, India’s highest.

Although he grew up in Trinidad, he says he felt like a foreigner and vowed to get out as soon as he could. At 17, he won a scholarship and moved to Britain to study English at Oxford University.

Though he never went back to his homeland, his first books were set in the Caribbean, and his first major success, “A House for Mr. Biswas,” published in 1961, was based on his father’s life in a society on the edge of the declining British empire.

Naipaul began travel writing with “The Middle Passage,” a tour of the Caribbean, before moving on to India with “An Area of Darkness” and “India: A Wounded Civilization,” in which he described a Hindu land injured by the Islamic conquest and the British Raj. Time spent in Zaire led to the novel “A Bend in the River” and the nonfiction book “A Congo Diary.”

In “Among the Believers,” based on a seven-month journey through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, Naipaul wrote that Islamic fundamentalism was a political desert that offered nothing to its followers:

“It is like a wish--with intellect suppressed or limited, the historical sense falsified--to work back from the abstract to the concrete, and to set up the tribal walls again.

“It is to seek to re-create something like a tribal or a city-state that--except in the theological fantasy--never was.”

After traveling the U.S. South, he explored the legacy of slavery in “A Turn in the South,” published in 1989.

To admirers, Naipaul is a clear-eyed observer of the developing world who depicts conquered lands not with magical realism or romantic spiritualism, but with all their warts and hypocrisy. To Westerners, in particular, he became “an insider thought to have more authority because he knew those places,” said Guardian newspaper literary critic Maya Jaggi.

But to his critics, many of them authors from the developing world, Naipaul was a pessimist and a neocolonial purveyor of stereotypes. In other words, he hated the locals.

St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, who won the 1992 Nobel Prize for literature, called him “V.S. Nightfall.” Others called him racist for his portrayal of blacks in Trinidad and Africa.

His answer to that, according to Margaret Murray, who was Naipaul’s mistress for 20 years, has always been, “I respond to people and not to race.”

“He saw the good part and the bad parts of colonialism. He wasn’t an apologist. He is more complicated, more profound than that,” Murray said in a telephone interview from Argentina.

Murray said she had thought the Swedish Academy would never make Naipaul a Nobel laureate because “he wasn’t politically correct. But he has an important body of work and is a very, very good writer. I think he deserved it.”

Naipaul has always portrayed himself as “a stateless observer,” literary critic Jaggi said. He sees himself as an objective truth teller who is devoid of any political or ideological agenda--a transcendent condition many writers consider to be impossible.

In an interview with Jaggi published last month, he called Britain “someone else’s landscape” and said: “I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.”

Naipaul has written 26 books in nearly 45 years, during which he seems to have made as many enemies as friends. He has had a bitter public feud with former protege Paul Theroux, who blames Naipaul’s second wife, Nadira, for driving them apart. (Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale, died in 1996; he married Nadira that year.)

Naipaul makes a habit of blasting authors, dead or alive. He once said Charles Dickens “died from self-parody,” and he recently attacked E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India” as “a pretense--utter rubbish.” He railed against Forster and John Maynard Keynes for their homosexuality and said he doesn’t have time to read Salman Rushdie.

“He is a controversial person, and he never pulls his punches,” said his former editor Diana Athill. “He has become a public figure, and people feel it is about him personally, but it is not him. The prize is given to his books.”

In his books, Athill said, “he struggles for a God’s-eye view. It’s a bit arrogant, and no one is ever pleased, but that’s what a good writer does.”

Athill edited more than a dozen of Naipaul’s books at Andre Deutsch publishing house before Naipaul left because she criticized his manuscript for the novel “Guerrillas.”

“Not that one had to do any work on them [his books],” she said in a telephone interview. “He’s an absolute perfectionist. He didn’t even need a copy editor. He had clear ideas about where he wanted a hyphen and where he wanted a comma. All we had to do is read to see if the typesetter got it right.”

The perfectionist had been tipped as a Nobel candidate for so many years that when the telephone rang with news that he had finally won, the Swedish Academy almost didn’t get through to him.

Nadira Naipaul said she didn’t want to bother her husband in his study, and the caller had to plead. Finally she yelled to her husband, “Vidia, there’s somebody very desperate to talk to you on the telephone from Sweden!”

“It was the last thing on our mind. He was overwhelmed and delighted when he got the news,” she said. “He was very touched--this validates his work.”

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A Sampling of His Work

V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad and moved to England to study at Oxford. He used the West Indian island as his first subject and then extended his writings to include India, Africa, North America and the Islamic communities of Asia. A look at his work:

In His Own Words

“The life that had come to Islam had not come from within. It had come from outside events and circumstances, the spread of the universal civilizations. It was the late 20th century that ad made Islam revolutionary, giving new meaning to old Islamic ideas of equality and union, shaken up static or retarded societies. It was the late 20th century -- and not the faith -- that ould supply the answers -- in institutions, legislation, economic systems.” (from “Among the Believers,” 1981)

“To see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament. Those nerves had been given me as a child in Trinidad partly by our family circumstances: the half-ruined or broken-down houses we lived in, our many moves, our general uncertainty.” (from “The Enigma of Arrival,” 1987)

A Selection of Works

“The Mystic Masseur,” London, Andre Deutsch, 1957.

“Miguel Street,” London, Andre Deutsch, 1959.

“A House for Mr. Biswas,” London, Andre Deutsch, 1961.

“The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America,” London, Andre Deutsch, 1962.

“The Loss of El Dorado: A History,” London, Andre Deutsch, 1969.

“In a Free State,” London, Andre Deutsch,1971.

“The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles,” London, Andre Deutsch, 1972.

“Guerrillas,” London, Andre Deutsch, 1975.

“A Bend in the River,” London, Andre Deutsch, 1979.

“A Congo Diary,” Los Angeles, Sylvester & Orphanos, 1980.

“Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey,” London, Andre Deutsch, 1981.