"Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense . . . He transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony." –The Swedish Academy, announcing the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature
"Naipaul is a magnificent novelist . . . A true aesthete and a true prophet . . . His work exemplifies the art that conceals art, and he is one of the greatest living craftsmen of English prose, perhaps the very greatest." –
The Atlantic "For sheer abundance of talent, there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V. S. Naipaul." –
The New York Times Book Review "The sweep of Naipaul's imagination, the brilliant fictional frame that expresses it, are in my view without equal." –Elizabeth Hardwick
"[Naipaul] watched postcolonial Africa with pitiless lucidity. His clear vision disturbs just as much today as it did when
A Bend in the River was published . . . The novel presents uncomfortable truths about the real world and great events. But it is also the story of unimportant people who matter to us . . . [It] presents a terrifying vision of life as it is lived in dark corners of the world, beyond the soporific blanket of western affluence . . . These are men and women trapped in history like flies in glue." –from the Introduction by Patrick Marnham