Abstract
When V. S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 few readers doubted that he deserved the honour for a lifetime’s achievement as novelist and for his travel writings; there was, however, a highly vocal group of critics who detested Naipaul for what they perceived as his political views. It was said that for decades the Nobel literary awards committee would turn from him to someone less controversial, someone with a less impetuous tongue, someone more progressive in politics. The award of the 1992 Nobel Prize to the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott seemed to seal Naipaul’s fate; the committee was unlikely to award the prize soon to another Caribbean writer in English. As other English language writers, Toni Morrison and Seamus Heaney, were given Nobel awards, Naipaul’s case seemed forgotten, but it was not. He continued to be nominated and he continued to write.
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Notes
Many of Naipaul’s sources and allusions are mentioned in John Thieme, The Web of Allusions (London: Hansib, 1988).
The factual basis of many of the writings can be found in Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1975).
V. S. Naipaul, Between Father and Son/Family Letters, ed. Gillon Aitken (London: Little Brown, 2000).
Rhonda Cobham, ‘The Caribbean Voices Programme and the Development of West Indian Short Fiction: 1945–1958’ in The Story Must Be Told: Short Narrative Prose in the New English Literature, Peter O. Stummer ed. (Würzburg: Konigshausen & Neuman, 1986), 146–60.
Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
V. S. Naipaul, ‘Our Universal Civilization’, The New York Review of Books (31 January 1991), 22–5.
See Ben Whitaker, ed., The Fourth World. Victims of Group Oppression (New York: Schocken, 1973). The situation for Indians became worse in Uganda, Zaire and Fiji.
He regards both as exiles wounded by their ‘homes’, who turned to travel writing. Arnold Rampersad, ’V. S. Naipaul: Turning in the South’, Raritan, 20:1 (Summer 1990), 24–47; 45–6.
Stephen Schiff, ‘The Ultimate Exile’, The New Yorker (23 May 1994), 60–71.
See Bruce King, ed., West Indian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1979, enlarged 1995);
Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and its Background (London: Faber, 1970);
Louis James, Caribbean Literature in English (London and New York: Longman, 1999).
See Naipaul’s ‘Foreword’ to The Adventures of Gurudeva and other Stories (London: Deutsch, 1976);
Reinhard W. Sander, The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen-Thirties (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 150.
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© 2003 Bruce King
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King, B. (2003). Introduction. In: V. S. Naipaul. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3768-1_1
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