The opening sentence of VS Naipaul’s A Bend in the River is memorable: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” Contemplating the “hardness of the world” Barack Obama used to reflect on what he called Naipaul’s “realism” and on that opening sentence in particular – of which, he said, “there are times where it feels as if that may be true”.
Born in the village of Chaguanas, Trinidad, in August 1932, VS Naipaul, who has died aged 85, grew up in an isolated, ritualised Hindu community, the descendants of indentured labourers. He won a scholarship to Oxford and then single-mindedly pursued the writing life.
His early novels were comic but after he began travelling – in the Caribbean, India, the Islamic world and various African countries – his vision darkened. Earlier than most, he understood the threat militant Islam posed to us all. Reading Naipaul can be unsettling, even desolating. Scornful of all utopian schemes to remake the world, he could be cruel and was dismissive of liberal pieties. His detractors disparaged him as an “orientalist”. His “realism” was certainly unsparing: not since Joseph Conrad had a novelist so completely absorbed himself in the shifting complexities of his age. And the books he has left us, blending fiction and non-fiction and political in the best sense, are among the most complex and fascinating of any postwar British writer.
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This article appears in the 15 Aug 2018 issue of the New Statesman, The inside story of Mossad