Shiva Naipaul

Shiva Naipaul (25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist.

Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul. He went first to Queen's Royal College and St Mary's College in Trinidad, then emigrated to Britain, having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford. At Oxford, he met and later married Jenny Stuart, with whom he had a son, Tarun [Shiva Naipaul- Sardonic Genius, Geofrey Wheatcroft http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/14024/sardonic-genius.thtml] .

With Jenny's support, Shiva Naipaul wrote his first novel, Fireflies and followed it with The Chip Chip Gatherers. He then decided to concentrate on journalism, and wrote two non-fiction works, North of South and Black & White, before returning to the novel form in the 1980's with A Hot Country, a departure from his two earlier comic novels set in Trinidad, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, [Shiva Naipaul- Sardonic Genius, Geoffrey Wheatcroft http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/14024/sardonic-genius.thtml] . Both his fiction and nonfiction were characterized by a starkly pessimistic view of Commonwealth societies which attacked the post-imperial native hierarchies for their crassness and mimicry of the west, and in turn the banality and diffidence of western liberalism.

On the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of 40, Naipaul had a heart attack while working at his desk [http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/14024/sardonic-genius.thtml Sardonic genius | The Spectator ] ] . The Spectator Magazine, for whom his wife Jenny had worked for as a secretary, as well as having published many of his articles, established the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, although it has now been discontinued [ [http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/29375/part_8/the-visit.thtml The visit | The Spectator ] ]

In his book Sir Vidia's Shadow, Paul Theroux's memoir of Shiva's older brother, V.S Naipaul, Theroux described Shiva as a 'sot', shrunken by the towering figure of his famous brother, who had a penchant for drunken partying and needed his meals made for him. Theroux also took issue with Shiva's skills as a writer, particularly as a travel writer. Recently, Sir Vidia's Shadow has come under attack for its demonstrable inaccuracies [ [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/23/sv_naipaul.xml&page=3 Patrick French's biography of VS Naipaul: Naipaul's friendship with Paul Theroux - Telegraph ] ] .

A radically more positive appreciation of Shiva Naipaul by the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator is backed up by the novelist Martin Amis who wrote that "Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room...in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius" [Martin Amis New Statesman April 1973 Black and White by Shival Naipaul as reprinted in The War Against Cliche, see also http://www.scribd.com/doc/971098/Martin-Amis-The-War-Against-Cliche-Essays-Reviews-v1-0]

A recent Arena documentary on his brother VS Naipaul reproduced footage of Shiva from an earlier documentary from the early 1980's, in which Shiva returned to Trinidad to see his mother [ [http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b009s80n BBC iPlayer - Arena: The Strange Luck of V.S. Naipaul ] ]

Works

*"Fireflies"
*"The Chip-Chip Gatherers"
*"North of South" (1978)
*"Black & White" (1980), published in the U.S. as "Journey to Nowhere",
*"Love and Death in a Hot Country" (1983)
*"" (1984)
*"An Unfinished Journey" (1986).
*"A Man of Mystery and Other Stories" (1995), a selection of stories taken from "Beyond the Dragon's Mouth".

References

External links

* [http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/n/shiva-naipaul/ information at fanstasticfiction.co.uk]