Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul on October 11 won an award that he had often said he would not win: the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Horace Engdahl, head of the Swedish academy which chooses the winners, phoned Naipaul to tell him the news. “He was very surprised and I don’t think he was pretending,” Engdahi said.
Naipaul, 69, has always maintained that the Swedish academy prefers politically correct writers and argued that his pro-Western views and criticism of the third world rendered him unacceptable.
Naipaul has had a love-hate relationship with India, the country from which his ancestors emigrated to Trinidad. Two early books An Area of Darkness in the 1960s and A Wounded Civilization – in the 1970s were bitterly critical. But the more recent India: A Million Mutinies Now is far kinder.
Certainly, he took care to mention India in his official response today. “It is a great tribute to both England, my home and to India, home of my ancestors.” He made no reference to Trinidad, the country of his birth which he is said to loathe. And inevitably, he also said, “This is an unexpected accolade.”
In an editorial titled “The Two Naipauls” published on October 16 that year, HT said that “one key issue has been ignored in the debate over Naipaul’s views on Islam and the third world… What has he got the Nobel Prize for? Has he got the Nobel Prize for Literature? Or has he got the Nobel Prize for Journalism?”
{{/usCountry}}In an editorial titled “The Two Naipauls” published on October 16 that year, HT said that “one key issue has been ignored in the debate over Naipaul’s views on Islam and the third world… What has he got the Nobel Prize for? Has he got the Nobel Prize for Literature? Or has he got the Nobel Prize for Journalism?”
{{/usCountry}}“Reading about the response to the prize, one could easily lose sight of the fact that Naipaul is, first and foremost, a novelist and that this is, allegedly, a prize for literature. And yet nobody talks about Naipaul’s novels,” it added.
“Those who praise him - and those who attack him - tend to focus on his journalism: his India books and his two hatchet jobs on the Islamic world. There is a good reason for this: not very many people read Naipaul these days.”
“None of his books sells enough to stay on the best-seller lists. Arundhati Roy’s sales for The God of Small Things probably top the sales of all of Naipaul’s books put together. And Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth outsell him routinely Nor does the fiction have much critical impact. When people are asked to praise Naipaul’s fiction, they go back in time to the Sixties to pick the Trinidad novels; a phase that Naipaul himself has long since grown out of. Not one of the novels he has written in the last 20 years is at all memorable.”
The editorial said that Naipaul’s fame rests on the controversy generated by his journalism.
“Even those who haven’t read the two Islam books - and neither sold terribly - will have read the interviews. They know what he thinks of Islamic fundamentalists and have noted his criticisms of Islam in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. They know also that Naipaul thinks that E.M. Forster was an importuning homosexual and that he loathes Salman Rushdie’s books. All this makes him a terrible chat show guest. But the winner of the Literature prize? History will have to decide that one.”