Text/Kang
This article was first published in China News Weekly, Issue 865
Indian-British writer VS Naipaul died at his home in London on August 11, six days after his 86th birthday.
Naipaul's life vividly embodies the two sides of human beings. He was both an outstanding and hard-working writer, a gifted novelist, a widely regarded Nobel Laureate in Literature and a figure to be reckoned with in the history of post-war English literature, but also a cold husband, a tireless prostitute, a vicious sex addict, a scheming cultural man, an all-seeing megalomaniac, a semi-open racist, a deep-rooted caste and a man who openly discriminated against women.
Don't be afraid to be an artist
The widow, Mrs. Nadira Naipaul, said that she "became a great master because of all his achievements" and that he "died surrounded by people he loved, and lived a life full of extraordinary creativity and great effort.".
He did. Vidiada Suraj Prasad Vidia Naipaul was born on August 17, 1932 in the British colony of Trinidad, the grandfather of an Indian laborer who came to the island to cut sugar cane, and his father, Sebosad, who had no complete education and was studious, became a reporter for the Trinidad Guardian and published a short collection of stories in English (Naipaul wrote a preface when the book was expanded and republished in 1975). In 1950, Naipaul received a government scholarship to go out of the island to study in England and enroll in Oxford. After surviving his first few years of loneliness and depression, and at least one suicide (he turned on the gas, but the pipes ran out halfway), he began to consider a career in literature. His father maintained a frequent correspondence with him and always encouraged him to follow the text. "Don't be afraid to be an artist." Sadly, He died of a heart attack in 1953 and did not live long enough for his son to be knighted and receive the Nobel Medal, Sipa sadder wrote.
After graduating, Naipaul stayed in London and continued to work for the BBC's Voice of the Caribbean, trying to write seriously after work, but not knowing what to write. Finally, "after we had gone through many migrations within Trinidad, after my trip to England and my life in Oxford, it was the story that came to mind when I—after two failed attempts to write novels—sat at the typewriter in that free writer's room at the Langham Hotel, trying to be a writer again." Luck took care of me that afternoon. So he wrote the opening chapter of his debut novel, "Rue Miguel": "Every morning, when Haidt got up, he rode on the railing of his balcony and shouted to the opposite side: 'Is there anything new, Bogart?'" ’”
Written in just five weeks, "Rue Miguel" contains seventeen independent but interconnected short stories to recall the simplicity or ignorance of the people of their hometown, full of irony and comedy, without losing bitterness and tenderness. Publisher Andrei Doych admired Naipaul's talent, but feared that a short collection of short stories by a trinidadian newcomer would not sell, so he suppressed the manuscript and instead encouraged Naipaul to write long stories. The latter accepted the condition, though not appreciatively— in 2002, he told his biographer, Patrick French, "Deutsch is a stupid man, really uncultured, and he caused me a lot of pain." ”
Social comedy
In 1957 and 1958, Naipaul's first two novels, "Psychic Masseur" and "Elvira's Right to Vote" (Chinese version of "Popular Election"), came out, attracting attention with the life stories of Trinidadians of Indian descent and their unique comedy. Miguel Street was published in 1959, winning the Maugham Prize two years later, and a third novel, Mr. Biswas's House, was published in the same year to great acclaim. In one fell swoop, these four social comedies established Naipaul's first-line writers and spokesmen for the so-called "Commonwealth literature" (later accepted as "postcolonial literature").
The six-hundred-page "Mr. Biswath's House" is Naipaul's best novel (if we have to add a "one", we can refer to the opinion of Yale Professor Harold Bloom and include 1979's "RiverBend"), the protagonist Biswas is suppressed and neglected at all levels of society and family, and wants to own his own house all his life in order to find independence and identity, and he dies unexpectedly, leaving only three thousand yuan in debt to his son who returned from studying in England. Through this poignant little character story, Naipaul recreates the life of his late father, Sibosad, as well as a family history of Trinidadian Indians and a social history of the imperial colonies.
English literary critic James Wood is a fan of Mr. Biswas's House. On the evening of August 12, he wrote for The New Yorker magazine, praising the book again: "This book is full of comedy and pathos, extraordinary wisdom and heart-wrenching pity, and contains a dual understanding of human motivation and social dynamics, which may have cost most writers a lifetime of effort, but written by a young man of twenty-seven or eight." (The only achievement I can compare to that in my memory is Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, published when he was 26; Cervantes may have been around 55 when don Quixote first came out.) ”
In 1990, Naipaul was knighted by the Queen and became Sir Vidya. In 2001, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "combining insightful narratives with upright observations in his work that drives us to understand the repressed historical existence."
Naipaul's own multiple identities—West Indies-born Britons of Indian descent, downcast Brahmins, colored people who married white wives, immigrants to the nobility of the suzerainty—are all a mixture of contradictions that give rise to alienation, alienation, rootlessness, and dispersion in the work, as the famous opening of Riverbend: "The world is as it is." Those who are insignificant, those who allow themselves to become insignificant, have no place in this world. ”
Dear Big Brother or accomplice of the colonialists
After the completion of Mr. Biswas's House, Naipaul began to travel the world, turning his attention to India, Africa and the Islamic world. By the time of his death, he had published more than 30 books, roughly half fiction and nonfiction. Among his fictional works are the short story collection "Free Country", which won him the 1971 Booker Prize, "Partisans" (1975), which depicts black revolutionaries in the Caribbean, "Riverbend", which depicts the life of Indian immigrants in East Africa and the chaos of post-colonial African countries, the autobiographical "The Mystery of Arrival" (1987) and "Half Life" (2001), and the 2004 covered work "The Devil's Seed". In many novels of the mid-to-late period, his interest in political violence has grown markedly.
On August 14, 2014, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, Naipaul (second from left) talked to Mai Jia, winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize. A fan worshipped Naipaul on the spot. Photo/Visual China
In addition to his novels, Naipaul published at least 15 travelogues and essays, which caused much controversy while dissecting the aftermath of colonialism while also having a strong critical connotation of the Third World.
In 1964, as soon as The Dark Land: A Journey to India where Memory and Reality Intersected, it became banned for "a negative description of India and its people." The Return of Eva Perón (1980) refers to countries like Trinidad and Zaire as "half-baked societies" rife with poverty, corruption, killing, and strongman politics, suggesting that his criticism of the Third World remains harsh. 1981's "Among the Faithful" (Chinese translation of "The Kingdom of Believers") and 1998 'Beyond Faith" (Chinese translation of "More Than Faith") also criticized the intolerance, coercion and enslavement of religious extremism, which made the Islamic cultural circles angry. Until 2010, when the European Writers' Parliament was meeting in Istanbul, Turkish writers launched a boycott of the two books, eventually forcing Naipaul to cancel the program.
"We have been at odds all our lives, about politics and about literature, and I feel sad now, as I have lost my dear big brother." On the day of his death, Salman Rushdie, 71, another great Writer of Indian descent, wrote on Twitter. Behind these remarks was the suspicion that his fellow writers had about him for decades: the colonialists cut open the flesh of the Third World, and Naipaul returned to pour salt on the wounds. Many have criticized his negative depiction of Africa for objectively defending European colonialism, even with the highly acclaimed Riverbend. Trinidadian writer CLR James simply accused him of espousing "what white people want to say but dare not say." Even James Wood told NBS: "He had a lot of anger, and anger took on all sorts of forms. You know sometimes when he writes about India or the Caribbean, as a lot of commentators have already pointed out, he's writing with a sense of brutality and prejudice – I think sometimes even some degree of racism. ”
Honest evil man
Naipaul always scoffed at critics. There is another reason for arrogance. The grandmother insisted that the Naipaul family was of Brahmin origin, but it later declined. He then called himself a high caste all his life, looking down on his Indians and repeatedly referring to the darker-skinned native Trinidadian masses as monkeys and. He repeatedly declared himself to be the greatest English-language writer, blind to all sentient beings, so he made a large number of enemies in the literary world, not only with another Nobel prize winner in the Caribbean, the great poet Of St. Lucia, Walcott and the famous American travel writer Paul Tayru, but also repeatedly spoke out against women writers as individuals and as a whole, claiming that women are "sentimental and narrow-minded", and as women, they can never really be in charge, so what they write is the same.
"Naipaul's favorite writer was his father, Sibosad, and Conrad had something to do, Flaubert had only one book that stood out, and everyone else had to sideline him or belittled by him—Joyce, Dickens, EM Foster, Maugham, Keynes, Jane Austen, Anthony Powell, Derek Walcott, and many others, including me." Tyru said in 2008, "I'm a 'pretty average guy, 'just write a travel book for lowmen and so on.'" I'm also a boring, 'nigger in Africa' teacher. ”
In 1952, Naipaul began dating his Oxford classmate Patricia Hale, and when they first had sex, they were both children, but after they married in 1955, the young writer who bowed his head every time he saw someone kissing on the screen began to frequent the brothel. He told French: "I don't know how to seduce a woman, how to get her excited and consider her pleasure. My upbringing didn't give me this. "Prostitution thus became the natural choice.
In 1972, he became acquainted with Mrs. Goodin from Argentina, nominally a mistress, but in reality as a tool to vent her savage sexual desires, beating, degrading and enslaving her for twenty-four years, while coldly marrying her until she tragically died of cancer in the hospital in 1996, after which Naipaul suspended his relationship with his mistress and married the Kenyan-born Pakistani journalist Nadira Alvi.
In his later years, he selected the writer Patrick French, exposed the above evils and indulged them in his official biography, "The World Is Like It", which shocked the world after its publication in 2008. "He didn't think it made sense to have a less frank biography," French said, "and his willingness to have a candid biography published in his lifetime was both a narcissistic act and a humble act." ”
Editor on duty: Zhang Ru