Talk:V. S. Naipaul

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Restoring old material about his life post 1958 to this article

As of today (Feb 19, 2014), this article days Naipaul to the year 1958. There is no mention of his work from 1958 to the present. There is a photo of a book matches from a match company he used to work for! What happened here? This is a disaster. I am restoring portions of this article that were excised when somebody decided to take it over and make it their hobbyhorse. Chisme (talk) 21:49, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

If you were paying any attention, you'd realize that he didn't actually work for that match company. Pictures give a feeling for the time of writing. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 22:03, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

I was paying attention. If you took the time to notice that this is an encyclopedia, you would see that cluttering it with pictures of matchbooks is a distraction. This article desperately needs to focus on its subject, not on his youth in Trinidad or secondhand Indian heritage. I am a big fan of his work, have read all he's written, as well as French's biography and Thoreau's memoir. A stranger coming to this article would think Naipaul is a provincial Indian regional writer from the Caribbean. You carved up this article and turned it into nonsense. You should no fix it. I took a stab at fixing it, removing what is extraneous and making it read like a modern essay, not a 19th Century Horatio Alger story. I hope you will respect my edits or at least understand that phrases like "by dint of good fortune" have no place in modern writing.

BTW, are you a native English speaker? Your writing is quite stilted and awkward. Chisme (talk) 18:11, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm afraid this is not the Simple Wikipedia or for that matter the Junior High School Wikipedia, nor is it ungrammatical ("it is near to Venezuela" (instead of "nearest") "who immigrated to Trinidad from Indian fifty years before his birth" (simple past instead of past perfect), "Naipaul attended high school in Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain" (wrong preposition) in the article or "you should no fix it" (above)) There is no WP:MOS mandate or directive that the writing be restricted to simple sentences. As for "dint of good fortune," it is used all the time in modern writing. Finally, as for English, perhaps you should also go edit both the English Grammar and History of English grammars pages, both of which I have majorly edited. I am reverting all your poor edits. The article has barely reached 1958, when Naipaul was a young immigrant to England, barely yet a British writer. I say above on this page that I've had family emergencies since October, that is why I had to stop editing this page (my user:Fowler&fowler user page proclaims this as well). I've been editing WP for for eight and have several featured articles and featured-class-articles to my credit. You, on the other hand, have 832 edits, and for all your interest in Naipaul, made your first edit on the page (since you arrived on Wikipedia three years ago) yesterday. The article was in much worse shape earlier. I am reverting all your poor edits. Let me finish the article, then you can come complain. Please read the discussion above before you make any further ill-considered edits. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 22:28, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

I can see that you and I aren't going to get along, but suffice it to say, I am not the only one who objects to your turning this article into some kind Indian schoolboy hagiography project. See the comments by User 130.132.173.25 and Robofish above. I don't care which Wikipedia articles you've polluted, English Grammar or History of English grammars, the following risible Dickensian intonations don't qualify as modern English:

"By dint of effort and the good fortune of receiving some education"

"In the new world memory of their genealogy...."

"chicken and fish had become honorary vegetables at the family's dining table...."

"The sari, the draped female garment of timeless India" (and I thought it was a big robe!)

"Arriving at Oxford for the Michaelmas term" (Michaelmas!)

"Hale and Naipaul soon became intimate."

And is it really necessary to say what food he carried when he left Trinidad ("He however carried with him a baked whole chicken and roti bread made by his mother.")

Your claims to having contributed more to the article than others, and your request that I and all other Wikipedia readers wait for your family problems to end so you can finish this article, lead me to conclude that you think you own this article. This is against community rules. See Wikipedia:Ownership of articles ("All Wikipedia content is edited collaboratively. No one, no matter how skilled, or of how high standing in the community, has the right to act as though he or she is the owner of a particular article"). I've attempted to show you the light. I think I'm going to have to take this to the admins. Chisme (talk) 01:28, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

I suggest you go edit the Simple English Wikipedia, its article on VS Naipaul is a stub and awaits your edits. Apparently, you forgot to comment on your mistakes (both in the article and above), to which you've added new ones: intonations? Michaelmas term is very much used, today. As are "soon became intimate", "By dint of effort" all 21 century usage (as books published in the 21st century are using them.)Fowler&fowler«Talk» 01:39, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

user:Chisme, I understand your frustration. I am back now. Please give me a month to finish the article. We can then have user:Brianboulton or user:Tim riley or someone else experienced such as user:Ian Rose (FAC director) or user:Stfg or user:Dank peer-review the article. How does that sound? Best regards, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 14:30, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Chisme has brought the Dunning-Kruger effect to illiteracy. -- Jibal (talk) 15:13, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Dunning–Kruger effect. I've learned something new. It caused a lot of heartache at the time forced me to quit. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 10:07, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

His Paternal Heritage is Nepali Pahadi Bahun (Nepali Hill Brahmins).

As many writers from Darjeeling, India, like Mahananda Paudyal, Mangal Singh Subba had tried to focus the paternal heritage of V.S. Naipaul as Nepali Bahun category with surname Nepal that has fallen into anglicized version of Naipaul. Like Kanpur to Cawnpore, Kathmandu to Catmando, Balbhadra to Balbudder, British wrote records of their own version. Nepal surname was written as Naipaul when there were army registration in Indian Hills. In his biography, there is told that his family came from around Gorakhpur and writers suspected a migration from Nepalgunj, Nepal to Gorakhpur, India. Once V.S. himself told my patriarch is Nepali Brahmins Bahun. (Source:http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture-e.html) Nepal surname is a famous family name originating in the Midwestern hills of country Nepal. Former PM Madhav Kumar Nepal, current Governor of Nepal's Central Bank Chiranjeevi Nepal are famous peoples from this surname. Thapa Kazi999 (talk) 10:36, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

This is what Naipaul said in his Nobel speech:

I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal. Two years ago a kind Nepalese who liked my name sent me a copy of some pages from an 1872 gazetteer-like British work about India, Hindu Castes and Tribes as Represented in Benares; the pages listed - among a multitude of names -those groups of Nepalese in the holy city of Banaras who carried the name Naipal. That is all that I have.

That's all we know. It's fairly ambiguous. -- GreenC 00:19, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

And here is the actual source, page 108 of the book Hindu Tribes and Castes as represented in Benares by Rev M.A. Sherring. (See the title page). It is dubious mid-19th century Raj ethnology (later roundly criticized when anthropology had become a modern discipline). Judging from the preface, I feel the book is not so much (as Naipaul seems to suggest in his Nobel speech) about the Nepalese Brahmins actually living in the Hindu holy city of Benares, but about the names of all the different castes and tribes of India collected by interviewing people living in Benares, which as a holy city attracted numerous visitors Pages 107 and 108 are about Nepalese brahmins. It says among other things, that they were considered "degenerate" by the Brahmins of the plains of India on account of their diet and drink, which included water buffalo and alcohol respectively. I should add that in the 1870s the romanization of Indian names in the Raj was not standardized. "Nepal" was also rendered "Naipal" and "Nîpâl" The author, an Anglican cleric, feels no admiration for the Indian caste system; indeed he thinks it is "a monstrous engine of pride, dissension, and shame, which could only have been produced in a utterly diseased condition of human society." Nevertheless, he is recording the castes in the spirit of Terence's "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" ("I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me."), which appears on the title page as well. All in all, I agree, the two pages are fairly ambiguous. Naipaul did not know his paternal grandfather. Whatever this relative's caste status was, of whatever region of South Asia, there is little evidence that it played any significant role in Naipaul's upbringing. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 15:59, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Give an emphasis on the platform

People from all low-class social systems, when they reach native-English nations grow up to their higher potential. This basic fact has to be mentioned with regard to all persons who are not native-English, but have arrived into such nations, and get to discard their original native-land tag and slowly acquire the native-English nation tag. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2405:204:D38E:A672:A0D8:F27C:C562:4E3 (talk • contribs) 06:45, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Not sure what this IP from Kerala, India, is saying. If he means native English-speaking (and not Britons), he's wrong. Caribbean English is usually considered a regional variety of native English in contrast to the regional variety of second-language English spoken in South Asia. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 11:43, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Missing work?

In the 'Early life' section, the article says '"In a prologue to an autobiography" (1983)...' but this work isn't listed in the 'Bibliography'. JezGrove (talk) 21:37, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

@JezGrove: Prologue to an autobiography is a (long) essay that had first appeared in a 1983 issue of Vanity Fair (the feature piece of the second issue after its 1983 revival). It was later republished as one-half of Naipaul's 1984 book Finding the Centre: Two Narratives, along with The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro, which had originally appeared in the New Yorker. That is why the 'Prologue' is not listed separately in the bibliography, although there may be a way to include this information in the article. Abecedare (talk) 22:09, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your quick reply Abecedare. Best wishes, JezGrove (talk) 07:42, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Thank you @Abecedare:. I remember that Vanity Fair issue well. It is still there in my shelves. I had the sense though while reading the essay that the raw material of his more distant past was becoming exhausted. A formal autobiography never came, but A way in the world and Enigma of Arrival were both autobiographical novels. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:11, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

The ill-fated rewrite

I began to rewrite the article a few years ago, getting as far as the early 1970s (after Guerillas but before A Bend in the River). Granted it had a lot of detail, but I was enjoying writing it. I had to reread his early Caribbean novels. I had to especially reread his lesser-known 1960s works, Middle Passage, Mr Stone and the Knight's Companion, The Mimic Men, and Loss of El Dorado. Along the way, I created little spin-offs on F. P. Wilson (Naipaul's professor at Oxford), Copying pencil (I forget the context now), and The Mimic Men. Then family emergencies got in the way. It didn't help that two editors appeared who were keen on skirmishing. Eventually, they delivered the death by a thousand cuts that led me to quit. (Incidentally, for all their claims of knowledge, they failed to add anything to the article other than, repeatedly, a mention of Nadira Naipaul to the lead.)

Given VSN's prolific literary career, any good article is not easy to write. I might look at it again, but I'm traveling overseas. Strangely enough Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (the Russell edition reprint from 1978) is the only book of Naipaul in my hosts' library. I notice that someone has recently redirected the book's Wikipedia red link to this (VSN's) page. I might write a plot summary if I can find the time. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 11:23, 2 September 2018 (UTC)