MUMBAI: Nobel laureate and India-origin author V S Naipual, known for his caustic writings on the country of his parentage, has said he has written enough about India and will not be writing anything more on it.
“I don’t think so. I’ve written enough about India. I’ve written these four books and two novels about India and many essays,” Naipaul said.
“My background is Indian, and I have always been interested in my background,” Naipaul said, while talking about his decision to travel to India in 1962 to write the book that would become ‘An Area of Darkness.’
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was in the city to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the third edition of the NCPA-run Literature Live Fest last evening.
However, the Trinidadian-British writer broke down soon when a reference was made to his highly personalized fiction ‘A House for Mr Biswas,’ which revolves around the life of his father published in 1961, saying “I have told this story so many times, but it’s very moving.”
As Naipaul was choking on those memories, his wife Nadira requested author Farrukh Dhondy, who was interviewing the octogenarian Nobel laureate, to skip the topic and move on.
However, the entire evening was seeped with his literary nostalgia as he kept on speaking about the challenges of travel writing, which is one of his forte, and his exploration of India.
While talking on writing, the ace writer noted that it has been a struggle all through.
“I was not born with all the information; I acquired it during my writing. There is always a struggle in writing, nothing comes easily,” said the author, who won the Booker in 1971 and the Nobel in 2001 and has over a dozen fictions and more than score of non-fictions to his credit.
Making light of the Nobel Prize, Naipaul said, for long, people used to say I will get it, but I never did. I thought my work had created such a “resentment” that it would work against me.
Talking animal rights, Naipaul, who like the late French authors Jean Paul Satre and Albert Camus, is very fond of his cat which is named after the Roman Emperor Augustus, said animal cruelty is a source of pain to him.
“My cat Augustus made me aware of such issues. The cat altered my life, I became very attached to it,” he said. -PTI
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