Cloze Test for IBPS PO Prelims Exam: 14th August 2018

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, who passed away at his London home on August 11 just six days ___(1)___ of his 86th birthday, will continue to ___(2)___ his readers and critics after death as he did in a writing career ___(3)___ more than five decades. It’s the way with great writers, and Naipaul’s ___(4)___ to being among the greatest of them was ___(5)___ long before he won the Nobel prize in 2001 — but he ___(6)___ simple appraisals more than anybody else. To read Naipaul, to listen to him, to follow his life story, was to be ___(7)___ nudged to reassess not just him, but also his subject matter and one’s own view of the world. He once said, “All my work is really one. I am writing one big book.” In that big book, he kept pushing back the ___(8)___ beginnings to understand how colonialism and migration ___(9)___ the modern world, and travelling ever wider to ___(10)___ how post-colonial societies shape-shifted. It was an ___(11)___ that started, and never veered too far, from his own biography. Born in Trinidad to parents of Indian origin, whose forebears had come to the West Indies as ___(12)___ labour, Naipaul was consumed by one ambition: to be a writer. It was, in large measure, ___(13)____ from his father, a journalist in Port of Spain struggling with the needs and ___(14)___ of a sprawling family and the lack of intellectual wherewithal to realise his dream. His father’s story would inspire Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1961), part of an early-life burst of brilliant ___(15)___ that began with Miguel Street, written when he was just out of Oxford University, and concluded in 1979 with A Bend in the River.