Tarun Tejpal - No Mimic Man, this: the incredible life of VS Naipaul

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No Mimic Man, this the incredible life of VS
Naipaul
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Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble
coming and you cant do a damn thing to prevent
it coming. You just gotta sit and watch and
wait. From Miguel Street, by VS Naipaul There
is perhaps no greater mark of a writers genius
that you cannot read him through his words
anyone who ever heard, saw, or watched V S
Naipaul engage in the real world will find this
throwaway philosophical aside on life entirely
alien to their experience of the man who was
famously precise, pitiless, and impatient. Yet,
that same experience of the man makes the words
inescapably his economical, deeply weighted,
deceptively simple.
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To describe Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
or V S Naipaul as he came to be universally known
as a writer' is to describe Einstein as a
scientist in many ways, for many writers of the
postcolonial era, he was the writer inventor of
a form, a language, a way of seeing that simply
did not exist before him a man who used the same
language available to them but somehow re-formed
it in his writing, turning the most simple of
words, most lucid of phrases into vehicles of the
deepest, darkest complexity. That was why not
only readers but fellow writers of every age,
race, culture and orientation including those
who had bitterly, often viciously disagreed with
the famously irascible writer were joined,
briefly, for a collective outpouring of grief
when he passed away on 11th August 2018, just a
week short of his 86th birthday.
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Born on 17th August 1932, in Chaguanas, Trinidad,
the grandson of indentured slaves who had
emigrated there from India, Naipauls singular
sensibility was, it seemed, forged out of
otherness a Trinidad and Tobago born
Indian-origin writer who went on to settle in the
land of his ancestors colonisation. While his
early novels set in Trinidad seem to speak of a
young man still finding his material and his
voice, he nonetheless, by the time he was 30, had
already written one of the greatest works of 20th
century literature, A House for Mr Biswas. Over
the next decade-and-half by the time he was 45,
he had published a jaw-dropping 15 books he
acquired global acclaim for his almost
otherworldly grasp and rendering of alienation,
and for his vigilant chronicles of life and
travel and of authorisation. In many ways the
man who was hailed as one of the greatest writers
of the 20th century could also be hailed as a
seer, intuitively grasping the potential for
radicalisation, for brutality and for human
darkness that has come to so deeply mark our
present.
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In announcing him as the winner of the 2001 Nobel
Prize for Literature some thought he should
have won decades prior the Swedish Academy
referred to him as the modern philosopher, a
writer of incorruptible scrutiny who compels us
to see suppressed histories. This, then, was
the loss, on 11th August 2018 not merely a
writer of extraordinary prose but an unflinching
seer of the human condition, whose novels relied
on the inherent irony of events to illuminate the
truth of the world, a writer who was at once
called a writers writer and who triggered
their fiercest anger for the often uncompromising
bleakness with which he looked both at the
country of his origin India and the land of
his birth, the West Indies, as well as his
visceral gaze on the African continent.
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He called himself the sum of his books that his
books say everything there is to say about him.
Describing his journey in his essay, Prologue to
An Autobiography, he wrote, Half a writers
work is the discovery of his subject. And a
problem for me was that my life had been varied,
full of upheavals and moves from grandmothers
Hindu house in the country, still close to the
rituals and social ways of village India, to Port
of Spain, the negro, and G.I. life of its
streets, the other, ordered life of my colonial
English school, which is called Queens Royal
College, and then Oxford, London and the
freelancers room at the BBC. Trying to make a
beginning as a writer, I didnt know where to
focus. And still, with no idea of his material
and no sense of the genre he wanted to occupy,
writing was all he ever wanted to do. In a
sweeping, often revealing interview with author
and journalist Tarun Tejpal, he remarked that his
only ambition was to become a successful writer,
to be known for his writing all over all the
world, right from the age of 10.
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He didnt know how he would become one, he told
Tarun Tejpal, or what he would write about, but
the fact of writing, and the need to become a
famous writer drove him it was the only noble
profession, he said. He hoped, he said, that
writing would come miraculously to him. Yet, when
Sir V S Naipaul started to write, his first two
novels failed to hold till just before his 23rd
birthday, he got the idea to write the first
sentence of the book that went on to be published
as Miguel Street, from a childhood memory. The
book came to him in a sweeping flow then he
finished the entire book within just six weeks in
1955. It was, unfortunately, not to be published
until 1959. But by then, his breakthrough came in
1957 when he published the novel The Mystic
Masseur.
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No-one, perhaps led by Naipaul himself, could
have envisioned the stunning arc of the next 50
years and his undisputed place as one of
literatures all time greats. He wrote just
over 30 books, both fiction and non-fiction an
output not merely extraordinary but almost
impossible to grasp, given the epic quality and
sweep of the work he produced. Tarun Tejpal,
interviewing the temperamental genius live in
front of a packed hall of 2,000 at THiNK fest,
remarked that the number of books Naipaul
single-handedly wrote are equal to the work of
almost 10 writers together. While the Nobel
prize was the penultimate of literary honours, it
was hardly his only in 1971, three decades
before the Nobel, Sir VS Naipaul won the Booker
Prize for his book In a Free State he also won
every other literary prize of note including the
Jerusalem Prize, Trinidad and Tobagos highest
honour The Trinity Prize, and was knighted by his
adoptive country, the UK, giving him the
honorific Sir V S Naipaul.
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Tarun J Tejpal is a journalist, publisher and
novelist. In a career spanning 26 years, Tarun
Tejpal has been the editor of the India Today and
Indian Express groups and the managing editor of
Outlook, India's leading news magazine. In March
2000, he started Tehelka, a news organization
that has earned a global reputation for its
aggressive public interest journalism. Tarun
Tejpal's first novel, The Alchemy of Desire, was
published in 2005. Tarun J Tejpal's second novel,
The Story of My Assassins, was published in 2009
to rave reviews. Also you can check Tarun J
Tejpal.