It’s the birthday of Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018), whose writing seems to elicit two adjectives from those who write about him: “pessimistic” and “contradictory.” He is considered one of the most important authors worldwide of the 20th century, a very big writer indeed with “withering insights” (Isaac Chotiner, “Where to Start with V.S. Naipaul,” slate.com, Aug. 12, 2018).

Naipaul was born and raised in Trinidad to an immigrant Hindu Indian family; he was the second of seven children. (The island of Trinidad is off the coast of Venezuela but evidently has more of a southern Caribbean feel to it; it rates 4.4 stars in googlemaps reviews. I didn’t even know googlemaps *did* reviews until just now.) About Trinidad, Naipaul once said, “That crazy resort place! How on earth can you have serious writing from a crazy resort place?” His pessimism seems to begin there, with his sense of humiliation about where he grew up, and extends to both the colonial forces he criticized and the societies oppressed by colonialism. Basically nobody gets off scott-free, and he wrote something to offend everybody. (Kind of brings to mind the academic, Camille Paglia.)

Naipaul left for the University of Oxford in 1950 and settled in England but set his first few books in the Caribbean. It was his fourth novel, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), set in Trinidad, that first brought him recognition as a Major Author. The novel’s main character is based on Naipaul’s father, and the novel portrays his struggle to buy a house of his own (however ill- advised) as a sign of independence. Naipaul’s collection of stories, In a Free State, won the Man Booker Prize in 1971. Naipaul went on to write more highly-acclaimed novels (like Guerrillas, 1975), in spite of saying himself that the novel was dead, and in 2001 he published Half a Life, the same year he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In a review of Half a Life, Jason Cowley of The Guardian called Naipaul “a cold, clear-eyed prophet, a scourge of sentimentality, irrationalism and lazy left-liberal prejudices.”

A number of sources recommend starting with A House for Mr. Biswas, if you’ve never read Naipaul.

Naipaul died six days ago (August 11) at his home in London at the age of 85. (Any thoughts that it’s a shame Naipaul couldn’t hang on to life until today, his birthday, are unworthy and shall not be articulated here.) He was survived by his second wife and her daughter, whom Naipaul adopted when she was 25.

Have a still-summery Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.