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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.
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_________________________________________________________________ Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education