In Stockholm: The Right Choice - 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature: V. S. Naipaul - Brief Article

Like the great masters of the past, V. S. Naipaul tells stories which show us ourselves and the reality we live in. His use of language is as precise as it is beautiful. Simple strong words, with which to express the humanity of everyone.

Born in Trinidad in 1932, the descendant of indentured laborers shipped from India, this dispossessed child of the Raj has come on a long and marvelous journey. His upbringing familiarized him with every sort of deprivation, material and cultural. A scholarship to Oxford took him to Britain. Nothing sustained him afterward except the determination, often close to despair, to become a writer. Against all likelihood, a spirit of pure comedy flows through his early books. It is a saving grace.

Footloose, he began to travel for long periods in India and Africa. It was at a time of decolonization, when so many people the whole world over had to reassess their identity. Naipaul saw for himself the resulting turmoil of emotions, that collision of self-serving myth and guilt which make up today's bewildered world and prevent people from coming to terms with who they really are, and from knowing how to treat one another. On these travels he was exploring nothing less than the meaning of culture and history.

Victimhood might have been his central theme, given his background. Not at all. That same determination to be a writer also liberated him from self-pity. Each one of us, his books declare, can choose to be a free individual. It is a matter of will and choice, and above all intellect. Critics have sometimes argued that people-in the Third World especially-are trapped in their culture and history without possibility of choice, and can be free only if others make them so. Naipaul's vision that all of us have to take responsibility for ourselves is too conservative for them. And yet: The absolute rejection of victimhood is necessary if we are to meet as we must on an equal footing. Unfashionable in recent years, it is this belief, courageously and persistently held, which has made Naipaul the universal writer and humanist that he is.

The comic spirit is submerged in his later books beneath a darkening sense of tragedy. Naipaul has written about slavery, revolution, guerrillas, corrupt politicians, the poor and the oppressed, interpreting the rages so deeply rooted in our societies. Long before others, he began to report on the irrationality loosed by religion in the Islamic world from Iran to Indonesia to Pakistan. This phenomenon was another retreat from history into self-pity which would damage everyone, but Muslims themselves above all.

The great moral to his life's work is that the human comedy will come out all right because when all is said and done intellect is more powerful than vicissitude and wickedness. The Nobel Prize for Literature has gone to someone who deserves it.

-David Pryce-Jones