Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in 1932, in Chaguanas, close to the port of Spain in Trinidad, in a family descended from immigrants, from north of India.
At the age of 18, Naipaul traveled to England, where after studying at the university college of oxford, he was awarded the degree of bachelor of arts in 1953.From then on he continued to live in England(since the 70’s in Wiltshire, close to Stonehenge but he has also spent a great deal of time traveling in Asia, Africa and America, devoted himself entirely to his writing) .Naipaul’s works consist not only of novels and short stories but also includes documentary, he is a versatile writer.
His work has often explored the enduring tensions between rich and poor, colonizers and the colonized in a rapidly changing world. He is the winner of prestigious booker prize and has written more than 20 books in the past 45 years, fiction such as A house for Mr. Biswas, A bend in the river etc and non fiction, including The middle passage on the west Indies among the believers: an Islamic journey .His letters from family written a century ago have been collected in a revealing new volume, between father and son: family letter.
His latest, a novel, “The Magic Seeds”, is the bleakly comic story of Willie Chandran who responds to the anxiety of his own displacement by trying to find “his own self”. He also featured in Naipaul’s last novel “Half a life”.
At the time of his Nobel Prize in 2002, Naipaul claimed to be finished with fiction. There was nothing for him or any other novelist-left to say.
The novelist and Nobel laureate V.S.Naipaul has said, in his recent interviews that fiction is dead, vanquished by our need for facts.
In an interview with Newyork Times, Naipaul recently declared that novel is dead. A couple of things stand out in Naipaul’s assessment. He says, for a book you need to read and think for almost a week .No one has that kind of time anymore, that is why the book that are now written no longer present society to society.
He further says that there are so many other entertainment options available, that reading is being squeezed out far enough; accordingly, he makes this remark.
There are too many other things today….to many things to distractions. The observation that the novel made are being made in many other ways.
Certainly, some functions of the novel have been co-opted by media. We now have investigative journalism, non-fiction, social movies, which can give you the basic message of a social novel in less time.
But argues that he don’t necessarily believe that no one has time to read clearly everyone on literacy bloc does –but if we all act like no one has time then statements like Naipaul’s will certainly become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
It is pity that Naipaul does not elaborate on what’s taking up all our time, because he would like to know what he thinks is keeping us so busy. It’s true that the average number of hours worked per week has increased in America. But America is hardly the whole world.
However, can Naipaul really mean that other media can do what the novel has done? The novel is a unique form, the “observations” it makes intrinsic to it. No movie or television show is going to explore a character in the same way a novel will. No work of investigative journalism is going to conjure empathy in the same way a novel does. A novel does not try to be what a movie does, and vice-versa. There may be some overlap, but neither can really replace the other.
But really, all this talk of “the social novel” or “a novel’s observations” is to talk about the novel in utilitarian terms. Why does Naipaul never discuss the pleasure of the text? This is the most meaningful part of the novel-the striking turn of phrase, the dialogue between book and mind, the ability to turn away from everything and towards quite contemplation for a couple hours .Unfortunately; these pleasures are also so often left out of all the heady talk of the death of the novel.
Perhaps those who are so apt to proclaim the death of the novel do so not with joy, but with resignation regarding the direction that reading is headed. Perhaps they still enjoy those literary pleasures unique to the novel, but choose to pose their remark with regard to a novel’s utility to society.
If so, this would be fitting. It is precisely this purposeful. Subjugation of a novel’s pleasure to its utility which is making the form seems so archaic.
The novel has not become outmoded as a means of transmitting information, but even if it has been, that is beside the point. The value of novel is found during the time in which you are reading it, not as some seem so eager to believe, the times in which you are not.
Then argues jay McClauny(sat sept 14 2005, the guardian) that imaginative story telling has the power to reveal underlying truths in a turbulent world.
He says he was alarmed to hear V.S.Naipaul declaring recently, in an interview with the Newyork Times, that the novel is dead, which would make him necrophilia.
Naipaul essentially argues-stop me if you have heard this one before-that non fiction is better suited than fiction to dealing with the big issues and capturing the way we live now. An accompanying essay, “truth is stronger than fiction” expands with a thence and concludes with a lucent.
“It’s safe to say that no novels have yet engaged with the post-september11 era in any meaningful way”. to which we might ask just for starters, where is the movie or the big non-fiction”” force that has done so.
We have been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after “Don Quixote” was published.20 years ago, it was common knowledge in American publishing circles that the novel was over.
Speaking of Naipaul, it’s surprising that no one has been discussing the long essay on him in the Newyork Times, his product of an interview conducted by Rachel Donalio. Naipaul here reproduces many of the comments about the state of contemporary literature that he has made elsewhere, though he was now seems to be reaching a new completely unprecedented level of transcendent crankiness.
