美国国家公共电台 NPR V.S. Naipaul, Controversial Author And Nobel Laureate, Dies At 85

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

V.S. Naipaul, winner of the Nobel Prize, has died. The 85-year-old author was at his home in London. Perhaps best known for his novel "A Bend In The River," Naipaul was a controversial figure in the literary world. NPR's Lynn Neary has this remembrance.

LYNN NEARY, BYLINE 1: By all accounts, V.S. Naipaul was not an easy man. His biographer, Patrick French, says Naipaul set high standards for himself. And he expected as much from others. Be it a waiter in a restaurant, a fellow writer or an entire country, Naipaul did not hold back his criticism when he felt it was deserved.

PATRICK FRENCH: If you think of the first line of his book "A Bend In The River," it's the world is what it is. And his view was that you looked at things straight on. You looked at them dead on. And you told the truth as you saw it, as you perceived it. And if that was going to distress 2 and upset people, then so be it.

NEARY: Naipaul's relationship with his birthplace, Trinidad, was nothing if not complicated. His grandparents emigrated there from India as indentured 3 servants. Naipaul has said he thought it was a mistake that he was born there. French believes he probably meant that as a joke. But here's how Naipaul described Trinidad in a 1994 NPR interview.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

V.S. NAIPAUL: After the destruction of the Aboriginal 4 people, there was wilderness 5. And then on that wilderness, late in the 18th century, there began to be created a plantation 6. And I fear that is how we have to think of the place. It can't be a country in the way you would think of Persia being a country or Turkey being a country.

NEARY: Naipaul's early novels give a warm and humorous view of Trinidad. "A House For Mr. Biswas," which some consider his best book, was based on his father's life. But Naipaul didn't want to get trapped in Trinidad like his father. So he sought and won a scholarship to Oxford 7. Biographer French says Naipaul's early years in Britain were difficult. He suffered from depression, poverty and loneliness.

FRENCH: To arrive in that setting with very little money, very little security, the racial prejudices of the 1950s, that was - it was quite tough for him. And probably the toughest time of all was after he left Oxford, and he really didn't know what to do. And he was so short of money that he was - you know, he was - he got ill. He didn't have enough to eat. He had nowhere to stay.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

NAIPAUL: It's such a difficult period. I don't want to be reminded of it. I prefer to deal with it in imagination.

NEARY: When a collection of his letters was published in 2000, Naipaul told NPR he did not believe in wallowing in the intense emotions of those early experiences. Instead, he used his writing to work through those feelings.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

NAIPAUL: What happens with pain is that, rarely, time does heal it. And one deals with - in the end, with an abstraction. To be reminded of the week-to-week difficulties of those times would be too much for me, actually.

NEARY: In his later years, Naipaul lived comfortably with his second wife in the English countryside. He was a highly respected writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. Still, he always seemed to be a man caught between two worlds, the world of the colonizer 8 and those who are colonized 9. And his views on the formerly 10 colonized could be harsh. But French says it is the tension between those two worlds that hone Naipaul's writing.

FRENCH: I think that if you've come out of something close to slavery, you've grown up in a colony. You are of Indian origin, but you come from the West Indies. And then you turn up in the 1950s in Oxford. And you make your home in England. You are from the most complex triangulated background possible. And out of that distinctive 11 experience, he created extraordinary works of fiction and nonfiction.

NEARY: Sometimes, it has seemed that Naipaul's caustic 12 pen and penchant 13 for controversy 14 would overshadow his accomplishments 15 as a writer. But biographer Patrick French believes those moments are short-lived. In the long term, he says...

FRENCH: I have no doubt that people will be reading his books for decades and centuries to come.

NEARY: In the end, French thinks that Naipaul was satisfied with his life but never self-satisfied. For V.S. Naipaul, the world was a provocative 16 place. There was always something else to be said, something else to be written. Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.

(SOUNDBITE OF FEVERKIN'S "MARCH")