Nobel laureate V S Naipaul dies at 85

Trinidad-born Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul passed away on Saturday at his home in London, his family have said.

The 85-year-old's literary flair displayed in titles including A Bend in the River and A House for Mr. Biswas, coupled with a misanthropic personality made him a controversial yet celebrated public intellectual.

"He will go down as one of the greatest writers of our time," fellow author and friend Paul Theroux told The Associated Press during a telephone interview, citing his mastery of writing about families and colonialism.

"He also never wrote falsely. He was a scourge of anyone who used a cliché or an un-thought out sentence. He was very scrupulous about his writing, very severe, too."

Naipaul's fiction and non-fiction reflected his personal journey from Trinidad to London and various stops in developing countries.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories".

His works explored colonialism and decolonisation, exile and the struggles of the everyman in the developing world.

While this won him accolades and the adoration of the Western literary establishment, many viewed Naipaul's works as divisive and often offensive.

Among his widely quoted comments, he called India a "slave society", quipped that Africa has no future, and explained that Indian women wear a coloured dot on their foreheads to say "my head is empty."

He also laughed off the 1989 fatwa by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie as "an extreme form of literary criticism".

The late Palestinian polymath Edward Said, meanwhile, described Naipaul as an "intellectual catastrophe" and a "native informant".

Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott complained that the author's prose was tainted by his "repulsion towards Negroes".

C. L. R. James, a fellow Trinidadian writer, put it differently: Naipaul's views, he wrote, simply reflected "what the whites want to say but dare not".

The late Palestinian polymath Edward Said, meanwhile, described Naipaul as an "intellectual catastrophe" and a "native informant".

Naipaul's own view of Said was no kinder, with the writer once describing the Palestinian academic as "an Egyptian who got lost in the world and began to meddle in affairs he knew nothing about".

In his reflections on Arabs and Islam, he was seen as reinforcing Western prejudices and feeding into a notion of an impending clash of civilisations.

His travels through the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia led Naipaul to the conclusion that ''there probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs".

On India, he provoked anger and was at times accused of promoting Hindu nationalism.

As his literary stature grew, so did his reputation as a difficult, irascible personality. Naipaul was a private man and did not have many friends, but his personal life entered the public domain when Theroux - whose relationship with Naipaul had soured - published a stinging memoir about Naipaul in 1998.

Sir Vidia's Shadow described Naipaul as a racist, sexist miser who threw terrifying tantrums and beat up women.

Naipaul ignored Theroux's book, but he did authorise a candid biography that confirmed some of Theroux's claims.

The biography, published in 2008, devoted chapters to how Naipaul met and callously treated his mistress, an Anglo-Argentine woman who was married and about a decade younger than he was.

It recalled Naipaul's confession to The New Yorker that he bought sex and was a "great prostitute man", and recorded Naipaul's frank and disturbing comments on how that destroyed his wife, Hale, who died of breast cancer in 1996.

"It could be said that I had killed her," he told biographer Patrick French. "I feel a little bit that way."

Agencies contributed to this report.