V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel laureate "who documented the migrations of peoples, the unraveling of the British Empire, the ironies of exile and the clash between belief and unbelief in more than a dozen unsparing novels and as many works of nonfiction," died August 11, the New York Times reported. He was 85. Naipaul "was born of Indian ancestry in Trinidad, went to Oxford University on a scholarship and lived the rest of his life in England, where he forged one of the most illustrious literary careers of the last half-century," the Times noted, adding that he was an "often difficult man with a fierce temper."
He won the 1971 Booker Prize for In a Free State, and was knighted in 1990. His many books include A Bend in the River, A House for Mr. Biswas, The Middle Passage, The Mimic Men, The Enigma of Arrival, A Turn in the South, Half a Life, Miguel Street, and Among the Believers.
While Naipaul's supporters "hailed him as a towering intellect--delivering an original, scorching critique refreshingly devoid of political correctness: attacking the cruelty of Islam, the corruption of Africa and the self-inflicted misery he witnessed in the poorest parts of the globe," BBC News wrote that for "his numerous critics, Naipaul's writing was troubling and even bigoted. They recognized his literary gifts but saw him as a hater: an Uncle Tom who dealt in stereotypes, paraded his prejudices and bathed in loathing for the world from which he came."
In an editorial, the Guardian wrote that Naipaul "exemplified a very current preoccupation: whether an author's personality can be separated from his or her reputation as an artist.... Naipaul's legacy will never be entirely straightforward--which does not mean he should not be read, enjoyed, debated and critiqued."
On Twitter, several writers shared their own complicated perspectives on Naipaul's life and legacy. Salman Rushdie posted: "We disagreed all our lives, about politics, about literature, and I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother. RIP Vidia." Preti Taneja wrote: "I learned from his caste snobbery, his misogyny. I learned from his exacting style and from what he left out--women's lives and worlds. I learned that I had to critique what I was taught to revere. #InAFreeState and #IndiaAWoundedCivilisation changed my writing life." And Pico Iyer said Naipaul "is out of fashion today because he wrote what he felt, he kept cross-examining himself and he refused to stay within anyone's ideas of him. But no one gave more eloquent voice to the poignancy of crossing borders--and the possibilities--than he and Derek Walcott."
The "life of the greatest prose writer in the English language of the last 60 years has ended at the age of 85," Amit Chaudhuri observed in the Guardian: "Though many of us disagree fundamentally with his views, we are beholden to what Naipaul has given us: not as members of a particular ethnicity, group, or gender, but as people, whose experience of the world flows into the experience of writing."
In Naipaul's Guardian obituary, Kenneth Ramchand wrote: "He was a difficult man to get to know. His meaning for the island of his birth, and for the world after the centuries of empires and colonies, 'everything of value,' as he put it in his Nobel lecture, was in his books: 'I am the sum of my books.' In time, that will be seen as his most appropriate epitaph."