V S Naipaul

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, a person of Indian descent, hailed as one of the greatest English writers of the 20th century, was born on Aug. 17, 1932 in Trinidad. In 1957 he published his first novel The Mystic Masseur, a humorous book about the lives of powerless people in a Trinidad ghetto, and the last The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief in 2010. In an extraordinary career spanning half a century Naipaul published twenty nine books which explored colonialism and decolonization, exile and the struggles of the everyman in the developing world. Naipaul, the “barefoot colonial” from rural Trinidad won the world's most coveted literary awards. Exile is a universal phenomenon; it is indeed appropriate that the complex exilic experience should get reflected in the writings of Naipaul whom Edward Said describes as “a true figure of modern intellectual exile.” It is not surprising that Naipaul's fiction interrogates the issues of cross-cultural interaction, and hybridization of culture in an “age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration” which result at times in fragmentation of self and rupture. However, Naipaul's dark and comic vision has received comparatively negligible critical attention. The present book, V.S. Naipaul: His Dark and Comic Vision fills the gap and charts out the evolution of Naipaul's dark and comic vision against the backdrop of his avowed opinions and the comic tradition as manifested in his multiple interactions over a period of time.