VS Naipaul, who has died aged 85, exemplified a very current preoccupation: whether an author’s personality can be separated from his or her reputation as an artist. The writer, who won the Booker prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State, and the Nobel prize for literature 30 years later, has delighted and beguiled readers with works such as The Mystic Masseur (1957), A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and A Bend in the River (1979). Drawing on his own life of deracination – a man of Indian family born in Trinidad who studied at Oxford and worked for the BBC before starting to write fiction – Naipaul made picaresque novels that glint with precisely cut sentences and are shaped into a thrillingly original architecture. His formal invention earned him a place as one of the very greatest writers of the past century. He was in the vanguard of a generation of Commonwealth writers who utterly reshaped the meaning of “English literature”.

Nevertheless, Naipaul’s particular point of view on the travails of colonialism and post-colonialism – both in his novels and in travel books such as Among the Believers (1981) – earned him severe criticism. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said found his picture of Islam unforgivably ignorant and cliched, and accused him of absorbing and repeating pernicious and misleading colonialist mythologies. As a man, Naipaul’s sheer naked honesty about his own unpleasant, sometimes violent behaviour was bracing, and threatened at times to overwhelm his purely literary reputation. He told his biographer, Patrick French, for example, about how he had beaten his lover, Margaret Gooding, so badly around the face that she was unable to appear in public. He did not seek to hide the endless humiliation he visited upon his first wife, Patricia Hale. Lesser sins included being magisterially hypocritical about fellow authors, revering Anthony Powell, for example, to his face while deprecating him in private; and an overwhelming arrogance about his own gifts that, while justified, was not exactly attractive.

A famous literary feud took off between him and his erstwhile friend Paul Theroux after the latter saw one of his own books, affectionately inscribed to Naipaul, listed in a bookseller’s catalogue; that slight resulted in a bitter act of vengeance, Theroux’s book Sir Vidia’s Shadow. (It might be noted in passing that female authors tend not to indulge in these acts of grandstanding; behaviour indulged in great men of letters would be reputation-destroying for women.)

Naipaul’s legacy will never be entirely straightforward – which does not mean he should not be read, enjoyed, debated and critiqued. Salman Rushdie’s brief tribute to Naipaul indicates the complexities: “We disagreed all our lives, about politics, about literature, and I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother,” he wrote on Twitter. In an era that yearns to render life in black and white, the complications of VS Naipaul are a reminder that it is more wisely seen in shades of grey.