NO HOUSE FOR SIR VIDIA:

In a 1974 essay that marked a breakthrough in his own understanding of himself as a writer, Mr. Naipaul wrote of his debt to the Ukrainian-born Conrad, who had also willed himself to be an artist in England and also traveled to the far corners of the colonized world. "I found that Conrad -- 60 years before, in a time of a great peace -- had been everywhere before me," he wrote. But in an interview with The Times in 2005, Mr. Naipaul revised this judgment. While conceding that Conrad was "great," he insisted that he "had no influence on me."

"Actually, I think 'A Bend in the River' is much, much better than Conrad," Mr. Naipaul said.

Mr. Naipaul's writing about Africa drew criticism from many who were unsettled by his portraits of Africans. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe called him "a new purveyor of the old comforting myths" of the white West.

He was also criticized for his unflattering portrayals of women. In "A Bend in the River," the protagonist spits on the naked body of his Belgian lover. In his 1975 novel "Guerrillas," the English girlfriend of an exiled South African resistance hero acts on her fantasies of native sexual power to disastrous effect.

Always attuned to the tides of history, Mr. Naipaul began to travel in non-Arab Islamic countries around the time of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. He visited Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia in the late 1970s, when they were witnessing a rise in political power and Islamic fundamentalism. His first travelogue, "Among the Believers," was published in 1981. A sequel, "Beyond Belief," followed in 1998.

He started his inquiry, he later explained, by asking simple questions: To what extent had "people who lock themselves away in belief shut themselves away from the active, busy world?" "To what extent without knowing it" were they "parasitic on that world"? And why did they have "no thinkers to point out to them where their thoughts and their passion had led them?"

The books are grounded in Mr. Naipaul's belief that Islamic societies lead to tyranny, which he essentially attributed to a flaw in Islam, that it "offered no political or practical solution."

"It offered only the faith," he wrote.

These books were harshly criticized. The critic and Palestinian rights advocate Edward Said argued that Mr. Naipaul had interviewed only those who would confirm his pre-established thesis about flaws in Islam while playing down local political situations that might better explain the rise in Islamic fundamentalism.

Mr. Naipaul also wrote perceptively about America. "A Turn in the South" (1989) is a travelogue about the Deep South, and in an essay on the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, "The Air-Conditioned Bubble," he dissected American political pieties. "The fundamentalism that the Republicans had embraced went beyond religion," he wrote. "It simplified the world in general; it rolled together many different kinds of anxieties -- schools, drugs, race, buggery, Russia, to give just a few; and it offered the simplest, the vaguest solution: Americanism, the assertion of the American self."

Mr. Naipaul increasingly lamented the limitations of fiction. The novel had reached its peak in the 19th century, he said, and Modernism was dead. Instead, he thought nonfiction better captured the complexities of the world. He said he wrote his novel "Half a Life" (2001) only to fulfill a publisher's contract.

In 1996, two months after the death of his first wife, Mr. Naipaul married Nadira Khannum Alvi, a divorced Pakistani journalist more than 20 years his junior. She survives him. He had met her at the home of the American consul-general in Lahore. In 2003 Mr. Naipaul adopted Nadira's daughter, Maleeha, who was then 25.

A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

The writer Paul Theroux, who was one of Mr. Naipaul's closest friends, had a falling out with Mr. Naipaul not long after the marriage to Ms. Alvi. In his book "Sir Vidia's Shadow" (1998), Mr. Theroux documented the arc of their complicated literary friendship, which began in Uganda in 1966 and ended abruptly in 1997 after Mr. Theroux saw books he had written and inscribed to his mentor listed for sale in an auction catalog. He depicts Mr. Naipaul as a great inspiration as a writer, but also petty, cruel and needy. The two men later reconciled.

For all his pessimism, Mr. Naipaul was confident that what he called "Our Universal Civilization" would prevail. In a 1992 lecture, he said his optimism derived from his belief in the idea of the pursuit of happiness, which lay "at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery."

"It is an elastic idea; it fits all men," he said. "It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don't imagine my parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away."

Naipaul's unsympathetic views of postcolonial life made him among the most controversial writers of his time. No white Westerner could have spoken as he did. He wrote of the "primitivism" and "barbarism" of African societies. He fixated in India on the lack of plumbing: "They defecate on the hills; they defecate on the riverbanks; they defecate on the streets." He denigrated the country of his birth: "I was born there, yes. I thought it was a mistake." He was a critic of Islam.

He was loathed by third world intellectuals and called, among other things, a "restorer of the comforting myths of the white race" (Chinua Achebe), "a despicable lackey of neocolonialism" (H.B. Singh) and a "cold and sneering prophet" (Eric Roach).

He made enemies as easily as sipping tea. He said: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me." He physically abused Margaret Murray, his mistress of many years. He spoke openly about disliking overweight people and about visiting prostitutes. A bindi on a woman's forehead signifies, he said, "My head is empty."

He had as many ardent defenders. Ian Buruma, the editor of The New York Review of Books, thought it was a mistake to view Naipaul as "a dark man mimicking the prejudices of the white imperialists." He wrote: "This view is not only superficial, it is wrong. Naipaul's rage is not the result of being unable to feel the native's plight; on the contrary, he is angry because he feels it so keenly."

At its best, Naipaul's work made these questions nearly moot. He was a self-styled heir to Joseph Conrad, and a legitimate one. "This is what I would ask of the writer," he once said. "How much of the modern world does his work contain?" Naipaul's work contained multitudes -- subtle and overlapping meanings, only rarely sledgehammer ones. He is the subject of an excellent biography, "The World Is What It Is" (2008), by Patrick French -- a good starting point, along with "A House for Mr. Biswas," for those interested in Naipaul's work.

Tweet   @brothersjudd