Latest news with #VSNaipaul
Telegraph
a day ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
We should still read VS Naipaul, even if he was racist
Civil wars among Nobelists aren't unusual, but what struck me about Abdulrazak Gurnah's verdict on VS Naipaul was its dismissiveness: 'I can't read him anymore.' To be sure, there is no denying the ghastliness of some of the latter laureate's politics, and indeed his unedifying personal conduct. Naipaul was abusive to his wife, serially unfaithful, and disdainful of friends and acquaintances. Yet it would be churlish to wholly dismiss the man who held a caustic mirror to the postcolonial world. Naipaul's letters suggest he was acutely aware of his un-PC prejudices – but still remained unrepentant. Much of his disdain for black people, one suspects, stemmed from the gradual transfer of power from white and brown into black hands in his native Trinidad. 'The noble ni***r is really a damned nasty ni***r,' he wrote to his wife in 1956, alarmed at the global sympathy for black nationalism. Later in life, his biographer Patrick French slyly quipped, 'the only Blacks he associated with were Conrad and Barbara.' But Naipaul, that enfant terrible of postwar letters, did not merely punch down; he punched everywhere. His pitiless gaze spared no one: not the postcolonial elites of Trinidad nor the ruling class of India, the land of his forebears. All were skewered with withering prose. There is no moral comfort to be found in Naipaul's fiction or travel writing. In a clutch of early novels, A Bend in the River and In a Free State among them, he dissected the disappointments of decolonisation – often cruelly but with unmatched precision. His India trilogy, particularly India: A Million Mutinies Now, forsook romanticism for a granular, disillusioned portrait of a society crippled by kleptocratic elites and riven by religious and caste prejudice. He chronicled, with a clinical and sometimes gleeful disdain, the stagnation that followed the high hopes of mid-century Third Worldism. No self-respecting nationalist could refute the maladies he so coldly diagnosed: entrenched clientelism, military repression, persistent poverty, pervasive cynicism. A child of the Enlightenment, Naipaul treated no society with kiddie gloves. Deriding what he called 'multi-culti,' he rejected the bromides of liberal multiculturalism. There was little warmth in his world, and certainly no humour – and these are the real defects of his oeuvre. Yet it is that unsentimental lens that also contributed to Naipaul's achievement. His curmudgeonly worldview, while unforgivable in life, supplied on the page a sharp clarity. Perhaps, then, the only way to read Naipaul today is with qualified, even begrudging admiration. To acknowledge his flaws – personal, political, moral – is not to absolve them. But to ignore his work altogether is to pass over one of the more incisive chroniclers of the postcolonial condition.
Telegraph
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
British Nobel prize winner labels fellow recipient ‘racist'
The British Nobel literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah has labelled one of his predecessors 'racist'. The Tanzanian-British novelist, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 2021, said he could no longer read the works of the late laureate Sir VS Naipaul. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, he said that the realisation had slowly dawned on him and led him to reread Naipaul's earlier work, which in turn cemented his opinion. Trinidadian-born British author Naipaul, who was knighted in 1990 and awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2001, was a divisive but acclaimed author, who achieved his breakthrough with his semi-autobiographical novel A House for Mr Biswas. He won the Booker prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State, and achieved success with his 1975 novel Guerillas. However, his personal views were questioned by many of his contemporaries. Naipaul had negative views on post-colonial life and wrote about the 'primitivism' of African societies. He also said it was a 'mistake' being born in Trinidad. Gurnah, who is best known for Paradise, By the Sea and Desertion, said that Naipaul was once someone he had 'read with great admiration'. He said he believed Naipaul was less cautious about expressing racist views as he became older and more acclaimed. Speaking at the festival in Scotland, Gurnah said: 'At a certain point of reading him, I thought, 'It's true, this guy is a racist.' 'And I can't read him any more. The case [that he is a racist] becomes less difficult in his later books.' 'Unguarded' racism He cited the author's 1979 work A Bend in the River, saying: 'It is in an unguarded form in some of his later writings. As he became older he [perhaps] became less careful.' Gurnah said he could no longer read the works of Saul Bellow, the late Canadian-American writer, either. 'I think I probably read everything he had written with great admiration and then a certain point came when Bellow was being asked which African writers do you read or admire, and he said, 'When you produce your Zulu Tolstoy then I will read that',' Gurnah said. '[I thought], 'Right, I can't read that guy any more.'' He continued: 'I'm afraid there are several writers that I read with great admiration who are now in that category. Because you find out more. 'You read with pleasure and a certain kind of innocence and then you learn more and think, well.' The author, who became a literature professor at the University of Kent, moved to the UK in the 1960s as a refugee from Zanzibar. He left aged 17, four years after a coup broke out in the former British protectorate. 'There's something dramatic about being displaced,' Gurnah previously told The Telegraph. 'I see it as an experience of our times and one that allows me to comment on certain issues and ask questions about the divisions between this land and another or the now and the before.'
Deccan Herald
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Deccan Herald
Momentous: Kannada writers hail Banu Mushtaq's Booker win
Translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, it became the first Kannada work to win the prestigious international prize. Indian writers who have won the award in the past are V S Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga and Geetanjali Shree.
Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Island memories — growing up in Ireland and Trinidad
Ireland and Trinidad may not seem to have a lot in common, but they both punch well above their weight in literary terms. Ireland's success hardly needs to be restated, but writers from Trinidad — the Caribbean island with a population of less than 1.5 million — have enjoyed huge international acclaim from the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul to contemporary prize-winners such as Monique Roffey and Claire Adam. Amanda Smyth may have a winning combination, then: she's Irish and Trinidadian, and the author of three earlier novels, the last of which, Fortune, was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Now in Look at You, which has a photograph from her youth on the cover, she has turned to what
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
We Were There by Lanre Bakare review – the forgotten voices of black Britain
'It's so hard to create something when there has been nothing before,' the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate VS Naipaul once complained to me, referring to his work for the BBC World Service programme Caribbean Voices (1943-58). That sentiment, that each generation of black Britons believes themselves to be bold pioneers working in a vacuum, has persisted since the beginning of mass migration to this country. But what if the contributions of black Britons were not carelessly neglected, but rather, as Lanre Bakare identifies in his estimable first book, We Were There, a history that has been more purposely obscured? The roots of the current Black Lives Matter-fuelled renaissance of black artistic practice in Britain were established decades ago in the relatively under-reported past. Bakare focuses on the Thatcher era of the late 1970s and 80s, 'the most restive period in postwar history', when, he argues, modern black Britishness was forged. The Bradford-born author complicates and deepens this story by shifting attention away from London, writing with quiet enthusiasm and sharp intelligence about black communities, including those in Bradford, Wolverhampton, Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff and Edinburgh. He unearths forgotten stories of black participation in cultural movements such as northern soul, whose popularity coincided with the emergence of reggae sound systems in the 1970s. One such story is that of Steve Caesar, a Leeds-based teenage migrant from St Kitts and winner of the inaugural northern soul dance competition at Wigan Casino in 1974. 'Northern soul helped me find a sort of way of belonging,' says Caesar, and yet his story was excluded from the narratives of a movement historically cast as a white working-class phenomenon by music journalists. Building on the work of cultural historians such as Stuart Hall, Bakare champions advances made by social activists. These include grassroots campaigners who in 1979 overturned the miscarriage of justice suffered by Bakare's fellow Bradfordian George Lindo, imprisoned after he was framed by racist police for a robbery he did not commit. The toppling of the statue of the transatlantic enslaver Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020 was a very public reckoning with the city's toxic past. Bakare shows that this direct action had been rehearsed in Liverpool three decades earlier. In 1982, protesters tied a rope to the statue of the former Liverpool MP William Huskisson, who had links to the Atlantic slave trade, and dragged it to the ground. Bakare puts that toppling into the context of the riots in Liverpool 8 (Toxteth) the previous year. The violence was sparked by police brutality, neglect and the kind of prejudicial thinking expressed by Margaret Thatcher in the aftermath of the riots, which she characterised as the unlawfulness of young men 'whose high animal spirits' had 'wreak[ed] havoc' on the city. Bakare ably demonstrates the key disadvantage faced by black people – a lack of information about their predecessors. In my experience, the interventions and successes of our forebears have been cynically obscured, creating the impression that nothing had come before. This discontinuation has often followed short-term initiatives by white cultural gatekeepers who pat themselves on the back for their enlightenment, which only lasts until the novelty wears off and the next worthy group emerges to attract their attention. We Were There acknowledges the true tapestry of British culture by shining a light on committed activists/artists, such as the documentarian Bea Freeman, the producer of They Haven't Done Nothing, a film about the aftermath of the 1981 riots. But the publication of books about the forgotten cultural history of black Britons can only come about if commissioning editors recognise previous blind spots. We Were There bridges the gaps to missing links and admirably achieves what it sets out to provide: further evidence of 'Black people's influence on the UK'. If these stories are only shown in isolation, 'they can be dismissed as curiosities', writes Bakare, 'that don't alter our sense of what constitutes British culture'. We Were There: How Black Culture, Resistance and Community Shaped Modern Britain by Lanre Bakare is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
