VS Naipaul, one of the giants of 20th Century writing, a Booker and Nobel Literature Prize winner, has died. He was born to descendants of indentured Indians in colonial Trinidad on 17 August 1932 with a journalist father, won a scholarship to Oxford and went on to write 30 books from comic novels set in his homeland to memoir and travel writing.
He was known as ‘independent, cussed, contrary’; ‘paying no attention to what was considered fashionable.’ His descriptions of life in the colonial world wasn’t always popular with those he left behind, especially his depictions of disintegration and hypocrisy of the third world. His private life was complicated with a mistress of 24 years he kept during his first marriage and when his wife died he moved relationships to marry someone else.
He was born with the generational bleak, tough-minded Pluto opposition Saturn in Capricorn square Uranus in place making him a trail-blazer but also disruptive, defiant and impatient. His Leo Sun Mercury were trine Uranus so he’d enjoy the attention he received by being an outsider and idiosyncratic. He also had a passionately enthusiastic Venus Mars in Cancer sextile a head-in-the-clouds Neptune Jupiter in Virgo. His Moon was in Pisces.
He had strong creative 5th and especially 7th harmonics chart and a hard-edged writers 21H.
Naipaul was born at Mercury’s inferior conjunction with Sun: Mercury (apparently retrograde) between Sun and Earth: a very potent moment in the Mercury cycle.