Posthumous story Naipaul in mourning

A few months before his death in 2018, VS Naipaul (Port of Spain, Trinidad, 1932-London, 2018), Nobel Prize winner for literature, composed this brief account, on three mournings which changed his life: the loss of his father, shortly after his arrival in London as a young immigrant, that of his brother Shiva, thirty years later, and that of his cat Augustus, found in a trash can, dead on his knees. “We are never done with grief. He is still waiting to fall on us, ”he notes in these poignant pages. This meditation on pain and death, by a writer dedicated to the lucid painting of the human condition born from the transformations of the postcolonial world, is tinged here with compassion and tenderness. To this unpublished is added another, from his friend the writer Paul Theroux, who tells in a few felt words this inconvenient man he admires, “badly hired and uncompromising”, who said “we” to talk about himself and who said: “You must not play with art. “Mr. S.