Thursday, October 11, 2001

V.S. Naipaul Wins Nobel Prize in Literature By SCOTT McLEMEE The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded this morning to V.S. Naipaul, a British author of Indian descent, born in Trinidad. In its announcement, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences praised Mr. Naipaul's work for having "united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." Although primarily known for his novels -- often set in Caribbean or African countries in which the legacy of the colonial era is still being settled, a process often portrayed in terms at once humorous and horrific -- Mr. Naipaul has also published numerous memoirs and works of travel writing. Among the works cited by the academy are A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), which it described as "one of those singular novels that seem to constitute their own complete universes." Strongly autobiographical, with a quality that often reminds readers of Victorian fiction, the novel portrays life in an East Indian community in rural Trinidad in the early 20th century -- a marginal group within a society that is itself positioned at the edge of a dying empire. The academy also noted The Enigma of Arrival (1987), which it described as the author's masterpiece. The book offers the complex self-portrait of a consciousness shaped by the old colonial system, yet planted in the English countryside. Although the academy describes it as a novel, like many of Mr. Naipaul's recent works, Enigma subtly blurs the lines between fiction, memoir, and cultural essay. Mr. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932, the grandson of a sugar plantation worker. His father (who has figured ever more prominently in Mr. Naipaul's writings over the years) was a journalist and writer. Mr. Naipaul attended University College at the University of Oxford, and began his career as a freelance journalist writing for the BBC. Besides his novels, Mr. Naipaul has published a number of works based on his travels in Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States. The academy particularly noted his "critical assessments of Muslim fundamentalism in non-Arab countries." He is the recipient of numerous literary prizes and honorary degrees, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1990. The Nobel Prize is apt to be controversial. While Mr. Naipaul is regarded as among the finest stylists in the English language, his work has often been criticized as embodying Western stereotypes about the "backwardness" of the developing world. Scholarly works on the author include Rob Nixon's London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford University Press, 1992); Timothy F. Weiss's On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S. Naipaul (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); and Lillian Feder's Naipaul's Truth: The Making of a Writer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). Critics have long noted the overlap between Mr. Naipaul's sensibility and that of Joseph Conrad, the Polish-born British author of The Heart of Darkness. The Swedish academy echoed that judgment in its citation, saying, "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." Many of Mr. Naipaul's papers are housed at the University of Tulsa's library. Background articles from The Chronicle: V.S. Naipaul Criticizes British Universities (10/6/2000) Literary Treasures at the University of Tulsa (4/20/1994) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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