The death of Sir Vidia Naipaul on August 11 will generate plenty of retrospective monographs and essays, most of them rightly laudatory, some of them less so. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, the descendant of Indian immigrants. In his teens he won a government scholarship to study abroad, and he chose to matriculate at Oxford. His first novel, The Mystic Masseur, was published in 1957 and well regarded by critics.
It was his fourth work of fiction, A House for Mr. Biswas, that made him justly famous. It’s the story of Mohun Biswas, a young Indo-Trinidadian who yearns for a measure of autonomy and achieves it little by little—as a painter of signs, a shopkeeper, a reporter, and finally a civil servant with just enough income to build a house for himself and his family, away from his suffocating in-laws. Biswas is one of the great literary works of the 20th century, a masterpiece of understated prose and gentle realism that interweaves deep human affliction and madcap comedy.
Naipaul wrote many other superb works of fiction and nonfiction. We are especially fond of the novel A Bend in the River (1979), the travel book A Turn in the South (1989), Among the Believers (1981), about the explosion of Islamic extremism after the Iranian Revolution, and The Writer and the World (2002), a collection of his finest essays.
Naipaul received the Nobel Prize in 2001 and deserved it.
Academic critics have never cared much for Naipaul’s fiction because he made no attempt to condemn the British empire or to portray indigenous cultures with nostalgia or undeserved sympathy. His prose is unpretentious; his plotting and themes avoid faux-literary knottiness. Naipaul’s works attracted millions of grateful readers but few doctoral candidates.
Various associates accused him of cruelty and abusive behavior toward two wives and a lover. Others testified to the man’s benevolence and good humor. He will be most often remembered, though, as a dizzyingly versatile writer who rarely allowed himself to publish a second-rate work—and one of a small group of Anglophone novelists in the second half of the 20th century who can genuinely be called great.
