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NOBEL PRIZE for literature 2001
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2001 is awarded to the British
writer, born in Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul “for having united
perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that
compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”.
V.S. Naipaul is a literary circumnavigator, only ever really
at home in himself, in his inimitable voice. Singularly unaffected
by literary fashion and models he has wrought existing genres
into a style of his own, in which the customary distinctions
between fiction and non-fiction are of subordinate importance.
Naipaul’s literary domain has extended far beyond the West
Indian island of Trinidad, his first subject, and now encompasses
India, Africa, America from south to north, the Islamic countries
of Asia and, not least, England. 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 his memory of what others have forgotten, the
history of the vanquished.
The farcical yarns in his first work, The Mystic Masseur,
and the short stories in Miguel Street with their blend of
Chekhov and calypso established Naipaul as a humorist and
a portrayer of street life. He took a giant stride with A
House for Mr. Biswas, one of those singular novels that seem
to constitute their own complete universes, in this case a
miniature India on the periphery of the British Empire, the
scene of his father’s circumscribed existence. In allowing
peripheral figures their place in the momentousness of great
literature, Naipaul reverses normal perspectives and denies
readers at the centre their protective detachment.
This principle was made to serve in a series of novels in
which, despite the increasingly documentary tone, the characters
did not therefore become less colourful. Fictional narratives,
autobiography and documentaries have merged in Naipaul’s writing
without it always being possible to say which element dominates.
In his masterpiece The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul visits the
reality of England like an anthropologist studying some hitherto
unexplored native tribe deep in the jungle. With apparently
short-sighted and random observations he creates an unrelenting
image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture
and the demise of European neighbourhoods.
Naipaul has drawn attention to the novel’s lack of universality
as a form, that it presupposes an inviolate human world of
the kind that has been shattered for conquered peoples. He
began to experience the inadequacy of fiction while he was
working on The Loss of El Dorado, in which after extensive
study of the archives he described the appalling colonial
history of Trinidad. He found that he had to cling to the
authenticity of the details and the voices and abstain from
mere fictionalisation while at the same time continuing to
render his material in the form of literature. His travel
books allow witnesses to testify at every turn, not least
in his powerful description of the eastern regions of the
Islamic world, Beyond Belief.
The author’s empathy finds expression in the acuity of his
ear. 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. .
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