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Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, the controversial winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature is dead at the age of 85.
Born in 1932, Naipaul left Trinidad on scholarship at the age of 17 to study in Oxford. After leaving Trinidad he never identified as Trinidadian and instead chose to identify as English and spoke unkindly of his country of birth, “I was born there, yes. I thought it was a mistake.”.
Naipaul wrote several books that cast a gloomy picture of life in poor countries and is most famous for the novel A House for Mr Biswas. The New York Times has pointed out some of his racist remarks in which he decounces African societies for their “primitivism” and “barbarism”. Regarding India he was even harsher: “They defecate on the hills; they defecate on the riverbanks; they defecate on the streets.”
Never one to evade controversy, Naipaul made misogynistic statements to the effect that no woman could ever write as well as he does: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.” He added: “My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”
Naipaul had an affair with an Argentine woman, Margaret Murray, while his wife and literary inspiration, Patricia was battling cancer and talked about the affair to her. The affair with Margaret involved violence and sadomasochism. According to the Telegraph newspaper his wife Patricia Naipaul only learnt that Naipaul regularly saw prostitutes in London only after he boasted about it in a magazine interview in 1994. She had just had a mastectomy and was in remission from cancer. V.S. Naipaul is reported to have told her: “You don’t behave like a writer’s wife. You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above her station.” The cancer returned and while her wife lay in bed dying, Naipaul proposed to his second wife Nadira whom he married only 2 months after Patricia died.
I agree, good riddance! Anybody who doesn’t see the problem of imperialism is not worth paying attention to. These are the people who can seat there and try to convince ignorant Africans that colonialism was good for them.