V. S. Naipaul

Sir
V. S. Naipaul
TC
Born Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul[nb 1]
(1932-08-17) 17 August 1932
Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago
Occupation Novelist, travel writer, essayist
Nationality Trinidadian, British
Genre Novel, essay
Notable works A House for Mr Biswas
In a Free State
A Bend in the River
The Enigma of Arrival
Notable awards Booker Prize
1971
Nobel Prize in Literature
2001
Spouse

Patricia Ann Hale Naipaul (1955–96)

Nadira Khannum Alvi Naipaul (1996–present)

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, TC (/ˈnaɪpɔːl/ or /naɪˈpɔːl/; born 17 August 1932), is a Trinidadian Nobel Prize-winning British writer known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad and Tobago, his bleaker later novels of the wider world, and his autobiographical chronicles of life and travels.[1] He has published more than 30 books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some 50 years.

Naipaul was married to Patricia Ann Hale from 1955 until her death in 1996. She served as first reader, editor, and critic of his writings. He dedicated his A House for Mr Biswas to her. In 1996 Naipaul married Nadira Naipaul, a Pakistani former journalist.[2] Naipaul was knighted in 1989.[3]

Childhood

"Where there had been swamp at the foot of the Northern Range, with mud huts with earthen walls that showed the damp halfway up ... there was now the landscape of Holland.... Sugarcane as a crop had ceased to be important. None of the Indian villages were like villages I had known. No narrow roads; no dark, overhanging trees; no huts; no earth yards with hibiscus hedges; no ceremonial lighting of lamps, no play of shadows on the wall; no cooking of food in half-walled verandas, no leaping firelight; no flowers along gutters or ditches where frogs croaked the night away. [4]"

 — From Enigma of Arrival (1987)

V. S. Naipaul, familiarly Vidia Naipaul, was born on 17 August 1932 in Chaguanas in Trinidad.[5] He was the second child of his mother Droapatie (née Capildeo) and father Seepersad Naipaul.[5] He is of Nepalese Brahmin Bahun ancestry and his great-grandfathers migrated to India. In the 1880s, his grandparents emigrated from India to work as indentured servants in Trinidad's sugar plantations.[6] In the largely peasant Indian immigrant community in Trinidad, Naipaul's father became an English-language journalist,[7] and in 1929 began contributing articles to the Trinidad Guardian.[8] In 1932, the year Naipaul was born, his father joined the staff as the Chaguanas correspondent.[9] In "A prologue to an autobiography" (1983), Naipaul describes how his father's reverence for writers and for the writing life spawned his own dreams and aspirations to become a writer.[10]

The Naipauls believed themselves to be the descendants of Hindu Brahmins,[11] though they did not observe many of the practices and restrictions common to Brahmins in India.[12][13][14] The family gradually stopped speaking Indian languages and spoke English at home.[15]

In 1939, when he was seven years old, Naipaul's family moved to Trinidad's capital, Port of Spain,[16][17] where Naipaul enrolled in the government-run Queen's Royal College, a well-regarded school that was modelled after a British public school.[18] Upon graduation, Naipaul won a Trinidad Government scholarship that allowed him to study at any institution of higher learning in the British Commonwealth; he chose Oxford.

Education in England

At Oxford, Naipaul's early attempts at writing, he felt, were contrived. Lonely and unsure of his ability and calling, he became depressed.[19] In April 1952, he took an impulsive trip to Spain, where he quickly spent all he had saved.[20] He called his impulsive trip "a nervous breakdown."[21] Thirty years later, he called it "something like a mental illness."[22]

In 1952, prior to visiting Spain, Naipaul met Patricia Ann Hale, his future wife, at a college play. With Hale's support, he began to recover and gradually to write. She became a partner in planning his career. Her family was hostile to the relationship; his was unenthusiastic. In June 1953, Naipaul and Hale graduated from Oxford.

In 1953, Naipaul's father died.[23] He worked at odd jobs and borrowed money from Pat and his family in Trinidad.

Life in London

"The freelancers' room was like a club: chat, movement, the separate anxieties of young or youngish men below the passing fellowship of the room. That was the atmosphere I was writing in. That was the atmosphere I gave to Bogart’s Port of Spain street. Partly for the sake of speed, and partly because my memory or imagination couldn’t rise to it, I had given his servant room hardly any furniture: the Langham room itself was barely furnished. And I benefited from the fellowship of the room that afternoon. Without that fellowship, without the response of the three men who read the story, I might not have wanted to go on with what I had begun."

 — From, "A Prologue to an Autobiography" (1983).[24]

Naipaul moved to London in 1954. In December of that year, Henry Swanzy, the producer of a BBC weekly programme called Caribbean Voices, hired Naipaul as presenter. A generation of Caribbean writers had debuted on Caribbean Voices, including George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Derek Walcott, and Naipaul himself. Naipaul stayed in the part-time job for four years. In those years, Pat was the breadwinner in the family.

In January 1955, he and Pat were married. Neither informed their family or friends. Pat continued to live in Birmingham and visited Naipaul on weekends.

At the BBC, Naipaul appeared on Caribbean Voices once a week, wrote short reviews, and conducted interviews. Sitting in the BBC freelancers' room in the old Langham Hotel one summer afternoon in 1955, he wrote "Bogart", the first story of Miguel Street. The story was inspired by a neighbour he knew as a child in Port of Spain. Naipaul wrote Miguel Street in five weeks. The New York Times said about Miguel Street: "The sketches are written lightly, so that tragedy is understated and comedy is overstated, yet the ring of truth always prevails."[25]

Early Trinidad novels

Diana Athill, the editor at the publishing company André Deutsch, who read Miguel Street, liked it. But the publisher, André Deutsch, thought a series of linked stories by an unknown Caribbean writer unlikely to sell profitably in Britain.[26] He encouraged Naipaul to write a novel.[26] Without enthusiasm, Naipaul quickly wrote The Mystic Masseur in Autumn 1955.[26] On 8 December 1955, his novel was accepted by Deutsch, and Naipaul received a £125 payment.[26]

In August 1956, Naipaul returned to Trinidad for a two-month stay with his family. Travelling by ship there, he sent humorous descriptions of the ship's West Indian passengers to Pat.[27] By the time he left Trinidad, he had plans for writing The Suffrage of Elvira, a comic novella about a rural election in Trinidad.[28] He wrote the novella with great speed during the early months of 1957.[29] He copied out many of the reviews by hand for his mother, including one from the Daily Telegraph: "V. S. Naipaul is a young writer who contrives to blend Oxford wit with home-grown rambunctiousness and not do harm to either."[30] Awaiting his book royalties, in summer 1957, Naipaul accepted his only full-time employment, the position of editorial assistant at the Cement and Concrete Association (C&CA). The association published a magazine called Concrete Quarterly.[31] The C&CA was to be the setting for Naipaul's later novel, Mr. Stone's and the Knight's Companion.[31] Around this same time, writer Francis Wyndham, who had taken Naipaul under his wing, introduced him to novelist Anthony Powell. Powell, in turn, convinced the New Statesman's Kingsley Martin to give Naipaul a part-time job reviewing books.[32] Naipaul reviewed books for the New Statesman from 1957 to 1961.[32]

With promotional help from André Deutsh, Naipaul's novels received critical acclaim.[33] The Mystic Masseur was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1958, and Miguel Street the Somerset Maugham Award in 1961, W. Somerset Maugham himself approving the first-ever selection of a non-European.[33] Eventually, the novel would be produced as a film under the same name in 2001.

The Capildeo clan with matriarch, Sogee Capildeo Maharaj, center middle row, maternal grandmother of V.S. Naipaul, with her nine daughters and two sons. They were to be the inspiration for the Tulsis in A House for Mr Biswas.
Seepersad Naipaul, father of V. S. Naipaul, and the inspiration for the protagonist of the novel, Mr Biswas, with his Ford Prefect.

For his next novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), Naipaul took for inspiration childhood memories of his father (later he wrote that the novel "destroyed memory" in some respects).[34] In the novel, title character Mohun Biswas is propelled by circumstances to take a succession of vocations (apprentice to a Hindu priest, signboard painter; a grocery store proprietor, and reporter for The Trinidad Sentinel).[35] What ambition and resourcefulness Mr Biswas has is inevitably undermined by his dependence on his powerful in-laws and the vagaries of the colonial society in which he lives.[35] According to author Patrick French, A House for Mr Biswas is "universal in the way that the work of Dickens or Tolstoy is universal; the book makes no apologies for itself, and does not contextualize or exoticize its characters. It reveals a complete world."[35]

The book consumed Naipaul. In 1983, he wrote:

The book took three years to write. It felt like a career; and there was a short period, towards the end of the writing, when I do believe I knew all or much of the book by heart. The labour ended; the book began to recede. And I found that I was unwilling to re-enter the world I had created, unwilling to expose myself again to the emotions that lay below the comedy. I became nervous of the book. I haven't read it since I passed the proofs in May 1961.[36]

Novels and Travel Writing

"The emergency was over. And so was my year. The short winter was fading fast; it was no longer pleasant to sit out in the sun; the dust would not now be laid until the monsoon. ... India had not worked its magic on me. It remained the land of my childhood, an area of darkness; like the Himalayan passes, it was closing up again, as fast as I withdrew from it, into a land of myth; it seemed to exist in just the timelessness which I had imagined as a child, into which, for all that I walked on Indian earth, I knew I could not penetrate. In a year I had not learned acceptance. I had learned my separateness from India, and was content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors."

 — From, An Area of Darkness (1964).[37]

After completing A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul and Pat spent the next five months in the Caribbean.[38] [39] As a result of this trip, Naipaul wrote The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America, his first travel book.[38][40] To gather material for the book, he and Pat travelled to British Guiana, Suriname, Martinique and Jamaica.[40] In the book, Naipaul portrayed the West Indies as islands colonized only for the purpose of employing slaves for the production of other peoples' goods. He wrote, "The history of the islands can never be told satisfactorily. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies."[41]

In early 1962, Naipaul and Pat went to India for a year-long visit. It was Naipaul's first visit to the land of his ancestors. The title of the resulting book, An Area of Darkness, was not so much a reference to India as to Naipaul's effort to understand India.[42][43] For the first time in his life, he felt anonymous, even faceless. He was no longer identified, he felt, as part of a special ethnic group as he had been in Trinidad and England; it made him anxious.[44][45] He was upset by what he saw as the resigned or evasive Indian reaction to poverty and suffering.[46][47] Naipual wrote Mr. Stone and the Knight's Companion in Srinagar. Before he left India, Naipaul accepted an invitation from the editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, a prominent English-language magazine, to write a monthly "Letter from London" for the magazine.[48]

Naipaul and Pat spent nine months in Africa, Naipaul serving as writer-in-residence at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. He refused to do any teaching, but finished his novel The Mimic Men during his stay.

"Coconut trees and beach and the white of breakers seemed to meet at a point in the distance. It was not possible to see where coconut turned to mangrove and swampland. Here and there, interrupting the straight line of the beach, were the trunks of trees washed up by the sea. I set myself to walk to one tree, then to the other. I was soon far away from the village and from people, and was alone on the beach, smooth and shining silver in the dying light. No coconut now, but mangrove, tall on the black cages of their roots. From the mangrove swamps channels ran to the ocean between sand banks that were daily made and broken off, as neatly as if cut by machines, shallow channels of clear water touched with the amber of dead leaves, cool to the feet, different from the warm sea."

 — From, The Mimic Men (1967).[49]

Naipaul had spent an overwrought year in India.[50] Back in London, after An Area of Darkness was completed, he felt creatively drained.[50] He felt he had used up his Trinidad material.[51] Neither India nor the writing of Mr Stone and the Knight's Companion, his only attempt at a novel set in Britain with white British characters, had spurred new ideas for imaginative writing.[51] His finances too were low, and Pat went back to teaching to supplement them.[50] Naipaul's books had received much critical acclaim, but they were not yet money makers.[50] Socially, he was now breaking away from the Caribbean Voices circle, but no doors had opened to mainstream British society.[52]

That changed when Naipaul was introduced to Antonia Fraser, at the time the wife of conservative politician Hugh Fraser.[53] Fraser introduced Naipaul to her social circle of upper-class British politicians, writers, and performing artists.[53] In this circle was the wealthy second Baron Glenconner, father of novelist Emma Tennant and owner of estates in Trinidad, who arranged for an unsecured loan of £7,200 for Naipaul.[54] Naipaul and Pat bought a three-floor house on Stockwell Park Crescent.[55]

In late 1964, Naipaul was asked to write an original script for an American movie.[56] He spent the next few months in Trinidad writing the story, a novella named "A Flag on the Island", later published in the collection A Flag on the Island. The finished version was not to the director's liking and the movie was never made.[56] The story is set in the present time—1964—in a Caribbean island that is not named.[57] The main character is an American named Frankie who affects the mannerisms of Frank Sinatra.[56] Frankie has links to the island from having served there during World War II.[58] He revisits reluctantly when his ship anchors there during a hurricane.[58] Naipaul wilfully makes the pace of the book feverish, the narrative haphazard, the characters loud, the protagonist fickle or deceptive, and the dialogue confusing.[58][56] Balancing the present time is Frankie's less disordered, though comfortless, memory of 20 years before.[59] Then he had become a part of a community on the island.[59] He had tried to help his poor friends by giving away the ample US Army supplies he had.[59] Not everyone was happy about receiving help and not everyone benefited.[59] Frankie was left chastened about finding tidy solutions to the island's social problems.[59] This theme, indirectly developed in the story, is one to which Naipaul would return again.

Not long after finishing A Flag on the Island, Naipaul began work on the novel The Mimic Men, though for almost a year he did not make significant progress.[60] At the end of this period, he was offered a Writer-in-Residence fellowship at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.[61] There, in early 1966, he began to rewrite his material, and went on to complete the novel quickly.[62] The finished novel broke new ground for him.[62] Unlike his Caribbean work, it was not comic.[63] It did not unfold chronologically.[64] Its language was allusive and ironic, its overall structure whimsical.[65] It had strands of both fiction and non-fiction, a precursor of other Naipaul novels.[66] It was intermittently dense, even obscure,[64] but it also had beautiful passages, especially descriptive ones of the fictional tropical island of Isabella. The subject of sex appeared explicitly for the first time in Naipaul's work.[67] The plot, to the extent there is one, centres on a protagonist, Ralph Singh, an East Indian-West Indian politician from Isabella.[65] Singh is in exile in London and attempting to write his political memoirs.[65] Earlier, in the immediate aftermath of decolonization in a number of British colonies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Singh had shared political power with a more powerful African-Caribbean politician. Soon, the memoirs take on a more personal aspect. There are flashbacks to the formative and defining periods of Singh's life. In many of these, during crucial moments, whether during his childhood, married life, or political career, he appears to abandon engagement and enterprise.[65] These, he rationalizes later, belong only to fully made European societies. When The Mimic Men was published, it received generally positive critical notice. In particular, Caribbean politicians, such as Michael Manley and Eric Williams weighed in, the latter writing: "V. S. Naipaul's description of West Indians as 'mimic men' is harsh but true ..."[68]

Back in London in October 1966, Naipaul received an invitation from the American publisher Little, Brown and Company to write a book on Port-of-Spain.[69] The book took two years to write, its scope widening with time. The Loss of El Dorado eventually became a narrative history of Trinidad based on primary sources. Pat spent many months in the archives of the British Library reading those sources.[69] In the end, the finished product was not to the liking of Little, Brown, who were expecting a guidebook.[69] Alfred A. Knopf agreed to publish it instead in the United States, as did André Deutsch later in Britain.[69]

The Loss of El Dorado is an attempt to ferret out an older, deeper history of Trinidad, one preceding its commonly taught history as a British-run plantation economy of slaves and indentured workers.[70] Central to Naipaul's history are two stories: the search for El Dorado, a Spanish obsession, in turn pursued by the British, and the British attempt to spark from their new colony of Trinidad, even as it was itself becoming mired in slavery, a revolution of lofty ideals in South America.[70] Sir Walter Raleigh and Francisco Miranda would become the human faces of these stories.[70] Although slavery is eventually abolished, the sought for social order slips away in the face of uncertainties created by changeable populations, languages, and governments and by the cruelties inflicted by the island's inhabitants on each other.[70]

Before Naipaul began writing The Loss of El Dorado, he had been unhappy with the political climate in Britain.[71] He had been especially unhappy with the increasing public animosity, in the mid-1960s, towards Asian immigrants from Britain's ex-colonies.[71] During the writing of the book, he and Pat sold their house in London, and led a transient life, successively renting or borrowing use of the homes of friends. After the book was completed, they travelled to Trinidad and Canada with a view to finding a location in which to settle.[72] Naipaul had hoped to write a blockbuster, one relieving him of future money anxieties. As it turned out, The Loss of El Dorado sold only 3,000 copies in the US, where major sales were expected; Naipaul also missed England more than he had calculated. It was thus in a depleted state, both financial and emotional, that he returned to Britain.[72]

Earlier, during their time in Africa, Naipaul and Pat had travelled to Kenya, staying for month in Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast.[73] They had travelled in rural Uganda to Kisoro District on the south-western border with Rwanda and the Congo.[73] Naipaul showed interest in the clans of the Bagandan people.[73] When Uganda's prime minister Milton Obote overthrew their ruler, the Kabaka of Buganda, Naipaul was critical of the British press for not condemning the action enough.[74] Naipaul also travelled to Tanzania with a young American he had met in Kampala, Paul Theroux.[74] It was upon this African experience that Naipaul would draw during the writing of his next book, In a Free State.[75]

In the title novella, "In a Free State", two young expatriate Europeans drive across an African country, which remains nameless but which offers clues of Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda.[76] The novella speaks to many themes. The colonial era ends and Africans govern themselves.[76] Political chaos, frequently violent, takes hold in newly decolonized countries.[76] Young, idealistic, expatriate whites are attracted to these countries, seeking expanded moral and sexual freedoms. They are rootless, their bonds with the land tenuous; at the slightest danger they leave.[77] The older, conservative, white settlers, by contrast, are committed to staying, even in the face of danger.[77] The young expatriates, though liberal, can be racially prejudiced.[77] The old settlers, unsentimental, sometimes brutal, can show compassion.[78] The young, engrossed in narrow preoccupations, are uncomprehending of the dangers that surround them.[77] The old are knowledgeable, armed, and ready to defend themselves.[78] The events unfolding along the car trip and the conversation during it become the means of exploring these themes.[77]

Writing of Guerrillas

In late December 1971 as news of the killings at Michael X's commune in Arima filtered out, Naipaul, accompanied by Pat, arrived in Trinidad to cover the story.[79] This was a time of strains in their marriage.[80] Naipaul, although dependent on Pat, was frequenting prostitutes for sexual gratification.[80] Pat was alone. Intensifying their disaffection was Pat's childlessness, for which neither Pat nor Naipaul sought professional treatment, preferring instead to say that fatherhood would not allow time for Naipaul's sustained literary labours.[81] Naipaul was increasingly ill-humoured and infantile, and Pat increasingly reduced to mothering him.[81] She began to keep a diary, a practice she would continue for the next 25 years.[80] According to biographer Patrick French,

"Pat's diary is an essential, unparalleled record of V. S. Naipaul's later life and work, and reveals more about the creation of his subsequent books, and her role in their creation, than any other source. It puts Patricia Naipaul on a par with other great, tragic, literary spouses such as Sonia Tolstoy, Jane Carlyle and Leonard Woolf.[80]"

Naipaul visited the commune in Arima and Pat attended the trial. Naipaul's old friend Francis Wyndham was now editor of The Sunday Times and offered to run the story in his newspaper. Around the same time Naipaul received an invitation from Robert B. Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, to do some stories on Argentina and Eva Perón. The Review, still in its first decade after founding, was short of funds and Silvers had to borrow money from a friend to fund Naipaul's trip. Naipaul also covered the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, at the behest of Silvers, after which Naipaul wrote "Among the Republicans," an anthropological study of a "white tribe in the United States."[82]


Critical responses

In awarding Naipaul the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, 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."[83] The Committee added, "Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony."[83] The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the novelist Joseph Conrad:

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.[83]

His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. The novelist Robert Harris has called his portrayal of Africa racist and "repulsive," reminiscent of Oswald Mosley's fascism.[84] Edward Said argues that Naipaul "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting what Said classifies as "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies".[85] Said believes that Naipaul's worldview may be most salient in the author's book-length essay The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after 10 years of exile in England, and the work An Area of Darkness. Naipaul has been accused of misogyny, and of committing acts of "chronic physical abuse" against his mistress of 25 years, Margaret Murray, who later publicly spoke out against his efforts to claim she "didn't mind" the abuse.[86]

Writing in The New York Review of Books about Naipaul, Joan Didion offers the following portrayal of the writer:[87]

The actual world has for Naipaul a radiance that diminishes all ideas of it. The pink haze of the bauxite dust on the first page of Guerrillas tells us what we need to know about the history and social organization of the unnamed island on which the action takes place, tells us in one image who runs the island and for whose profit the island is run and at what cost to the life of the island this profit has historically been obtained, but all of this implicit information pales in the presence of the physical fact, the dust itself.... The world Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual human endeavour.... This world of Naipaul's is in fact charged with what can only be described as a romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact...

Bibliography

Fiction
Non-fiction

See also

Notes

  1. ↑
    /ˈvɪd.jɑːˌdər/ /ˈsuːˌrədʒ//ˌprəˈsɑːd/ (two words are concatenated in the second name) Meaning: vidiādhar (Hindi "possessed of learning," (p. 921) from vidyā (Sanskrit "knowledge, learning," p. 921) + dhar (Sanskrit "holding, supporting," p. 524)); sūrajprasād (from sūraj (Hindi "sun," p. 1036) + prasād (Sanskrit "gift, boon, blessing," p. 666)) from McGregor, R. S. (1993), The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, Oxford University Press.

Citations

  1. ↑ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001". Nobelprize.org.
  2. ↑ Miller, Marjorie (12 October 2001). "The World; V.S. Naipaul Receives Nobel for Literature". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 21 September 2011.
  3. ↑ "Knights Bachelor". London Gazette (Supplement) no. 51981. 29 December 1989. p. 2. Retrieved 18 April 2015.
  4. ↑ Naipaul 1987, p. 352.
  5. 1 2 Hayward 2002, p. 5.
  6. ↑ French 2008, p. 12.
  7. ↑ French 2008, p. 18b:"There was talk of him (Seepersad) becoming a pundit, and he learned some Sanskrit. Soookdeo Misir, ... gave him a basic education. ... by the time he was in his late teens, he had escaped from the likely future as an agricultural labourer in the grim depths of the rural Indian community. He had taught himself how to read and write English, and had conceived the idea of becoming a journalist, a profession that was usually open to Whites and Negroes."
  8. ↑ French 2008, p. 19: "In 1929, the year of his marriage, Seepersad began work as a freelance reporter on the Trinidad Guardian, ..."
  9. ↑ Hayward 2002, p. 7.
  10. ↑ French 2008, pp. 36–37: "Vido spent much of his time at Petit Valley with Pa, who would read to him and sometimes to other children: extracts from Julius Caesar, Nicholas Nickleby, Three Men in a Boat, ... Pa and Vido positioned themselves in an ordered fantasy world derived from European literature. ... Aspiration and ambition became the alternative to daily life..."
  11. ↑ French 2008, pp. 23–25:"The three surviving photographs of Capildeo Maharah (Naipaul's maternal grandfather) show him looking distinctly Brahminical. ... He wears white clothing befitting his caste, his shoes are unlaced to indicate that he has not touched leather with his hand, ... This physical evidence, combined with the certainty that he knew Sanskrit, make his claimed family lineage highly plausible. ... Seepersad's antecedents are vague; he never liked to discuss his childhood. ... Nyepaul (Naipaul's paternal grandfather) may have been a pure Brahmin, a Brahmin-by-boat, or he may have come from another caste background altogether. ... V. S. Naipaul never addressed this inconsistency, preferring to embrace the implied "caste sense" of his mother's family, ..."
  12. ↑ French 2008, p. 55a: "Hinduism had regulations on all things: clothing, ritual pollution, caste distinction, bodily functions, diet."
  13. ↑ French 2008, p. 55b: The Naipaul family were not vegetarian, as most Brahmins are supposed to be; they sometimes ate meat, and treated chicken as a vegetable. At Christmas they would celebrate with baked fowl, dalpuri, nuts and fruit."
  14. ↑ French 2008, pp. 208–209: (caption) Above left: "Vidia with his glamorous sisters, ... Long gone were the days of covered heads and traditional dress for Indian women in Trinidad and Tobago. Above right: Ma (Naipaul's mother) in heels with an Oxford-returned Vidia, 1956."
  15. ↑ French 2008, p. 26: "What Nanie (Naipaul's maternal grandmother) said, went. .... (quoted) 'Nanie believed in the Hindu way of life but the irony of it is, she would help with the churches and celebrate all the Catholic festivals. ... She told us that she wanted us to speak in English, not Hindi, because we had to be educated.'"
  16. ↑ French 2008, p. 30: "Nanie had bought a house, 17 Luis Street, in the Port of Spain suburb of Woodbrook. ... This coincided with Seepersad's recovery from his nervous breakdown, and his success in 1938 in regaining his job as a Guardian journalist. It was decided that the Naipaul family ... would move to Luis Street."
  17. ↑ French 2008, pp. 32–33: "The idyll could not last. In 1940, Seepersad and Droapatie were told by Nanie that they would be moving to a new family commune at a place called Petit Valley. ... In 1943, Seepersad could stand it no longer at Petit Valley and the Naipaul family moved in desperation to 17 Luis Street.
  18. ↑ French 2008, pp. 40–41: "QRC was modelled on an English boys' public school, and offered a high standard of education. ... He enjoyed his classes in Latin, French, Spanish and Science. It was a highly competitive school, with metropolitan values. Caribbean dialect was ironed out in favour of standard English, although the students remained bilingual...."
  19. ↑ French 2008, p. 90.
  20. ↑ French 2008, pp. 92–93.
  21. ↑ French 2008, p. 93: "When Vidia got back to England, he was in a bad state. Trinidad was off. 'The fact is,' he admitted, 'I spent too much money in Spain. And, during the nervous breakdown (yes, it was that) I had, I grew rash and reckless ... My only opportunity of recuperating from my present chaos is to remain in England this summer and live very cheaply.'"
  22. ↑ Jussawalla 1997, p. 126: "At Oxford he continued to suffer. 'I drifted into something like a mental illness,' he would write."
  23. ↑ French 2008, p. 123.
  24. ↑ Naipaul 1983c.
  25. ↑ Poore, Charles (5 May 1960), "Miguel Street", New York Times. Retrieved 20 June 2014.
  26. 1 2 3 4 French 2008, pp. 155–156.
  27. ↑ French 2008, p. 161.
  28. ↑ French 2008, pp. 171–172.
  29. ↑ French 2008, p. 173.
  30. ↑ French 2008, pp. 174–175.
  31. 1 2 French 2008, pp. 180–181.
  32. 1 2 French 2008, pp. 186–187.
  33. 1 2 French 2008, p. 185.
  34. ↑ French 2008, p. 192.
  35. 1 2 3 French 2008, p. 193.
  36. ↑ Naipaul 1999a, p. 128.
  37. ↑ Naipaul 1964.
  38. 1 2 French 2008, p. 201.
  39. ↑ French 2008, pp. 201–202.
  40. 1 2 Dooley 2006, p. 37.
  41. ↑ French 2008, p. 203.
  42. ↑ French 2008, p. 230.
  43. ↑ Dooley 2006, p. 44.
  44. ↑ French 2008, p. 215.
  45. ↑ Dooley 2006, pp. 41–42.
  46. ↑ French 2008, p. 217.
  47. ↑ Dooley, pp. 42–43.
  48. ↑ French 2008, pp. 232–233.
  49. ↑ Naipaul 1967, p. 133.
  50. 1 2 3 4 French 2008, p. 239.
  51. 1 2 French 2008, pp. 219–220.
  52. ↑ French 2008, p. 240.
  53. 1 2 French 2008, pp. 241–242.
  54. ↑ French 2008, pp. 243–244.
  55. ↑ French 2008, p. 244.
  56. 1 2 3 4 French 2008, p. 247.
  57. ↑ King 2003, p. 69.
  58. 1 2 3 Dooley 2006, p. 57.
  59. 1 2 3 4 5 Dooley 2006, p. 58.
  60. ↑ French 2008, p. 248.
  61. ↑ French 2008, p. 249.
  62. 1 2 French 2008, p. 250.
  63. ↑ Dooley 2008, p. 55.
  64. 1 2 King 2003, pp. 77–78.
  65. 1 2 3 4 King 2003, p. 71.
  66. ↑ Dooley 2008, p. 54.
  67. ↑ Dooley 2008, p. 53.
  68. ↑ French 2008, p. 257.
  69. 1 2 3 4 French 2008, p. 258.
  70. 1 2 3 4 King 2003, pp. 83–84.
  71. 1 2 French 2008, p. 270.
  72. 1 2 King 2003, pp. 84–85.
  73. 1 2 3 French 2008, p. 253.
  74. 1 2 French 2008, p. 254.
  75. ↑ French 2008, p. 255.
  76. 1 2 3 King 2003, pp. 91–92.
  77. 1 2 3 4 5 King 2003, pp. 87–88.
  78. 1 2 King 2003, p. 88.
  79. ↑ French 2008, p. 295.
  80. 1 2 3 4 French 2008, pp. 300–301.
  81. 1 2 French 2008, p. 272.
  82. ↑ 032c.com. "ROBERT SILVERS: We Do What We Want". Retrieved 21 July 2014.
  83. 1 2 3 "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001: V. S. Naipaul (Press Release)". Svenska Akademien. 11 October 2001.
  84. ↑ Greig, Geordie. "VS Naipaul: You might not like it, but this is Africa – exactly as I saw it". The London Evening Standard. Retrieved 14 June 2014.
  85. ↑ Said, Edward W (1 March 2002). "Edward Said on Naipaul". Archived from the original on 10 October 2007. Retrieved 10 October 2008.
  86. ↑ Levy, Geoffrey (30 January 2009). "Misogyny, mistresses and sadism: Why Nobel prize winning author VS Naipaul is at the centre of the most vicious literary war of the decade". The Daily Mail. Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  87. ↑ Didion, Joan (12 June 1980). "Without Regret or Hope". The New York Review of Books.

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