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Vidiadhar
Surajprasad Naipaul, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, was
born in Trinidad in 1932 to descendants of Indian immigrants. Educated at Oxford
University, he began to write in London, 1954. International literary
acclaim first came to him following publication of A House for Mr. Biswas
(1961), regarded by many critics as his masterpiece.
In The New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma
wrote: "Naipaul, the man from Trinidad, where, as he often tells us,
history is dark and vague, where few things are made, where ambitions run into
the sand, is interested in men who want to escape from Fate. Fate belongs
to a world of magic and myths and ritual, a world with a past but without
history. Naipaul's heroes don't always succeed in stripping rituals of
their magic; their quest for freedom is sometimes pathetic, confused, even
hopeless, but at least they put up a fight. ..."
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