Did the Swedish Academy have a fit of conscience? A sudden access of common sense? A literary metanoia? Whatever happened, we were both pleased and astonished at the news that this year’s Nobel Prize in literature was to be awarded to the Trinidad-born British novelist V. S. Naipaul. We were pleased because there is no one now writing who is more deserving of the honor than Mr.—since 1989, Sir Vidia—Naipaul. His novels—we think particularly of A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), Guerrillas (1975), and A Bend in the River (1979)—are among the most penetrating, gracefully written, and psychologically subtle of our time. And his cultural reportage—especially Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998), his two books about Islamic fundamentalism—provides a courageous and devastatingly accurate look into the furnace of religious fanaticism. Naipaul’s oeuvre makes important contributio ...

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