Nobility in the Nobel.

Nothing much happens in Sweden during the long and dark winter season, except the award of the Nobel prizes. This puts the country on the map, and the Swedes rightly revel in the occasion. They do it in the grandest style. This year was the centenary of the prizes, and all previous laureates were invited to celebrate in Stockholm.

The winners of the prize for literature, it is notorious, are a mixed bag. The Swedish Academy makes the choices, and in recent years it has often seemed stuck in a Sixties timewarp, rewarding writers for whom the West and its civilization are the source of everything wrong with the world. There are magnificent exceptions, of course, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Saul Bellow, and Czeslaw Milosz, but for whatever reason these were three among others who stayed away. Through the barrage of television programs and interviews, or just overhearing conversation in the crush bar, we guests could catch a groundswell of monotonous opinion that the United States in its arrogance was really to blame for the terrorism it suffered, and in any case those who had attacked the World Trade Center weren't terrorists, but a righteous entity called "the poor." How busy and self-important some of the previous winners looked: Gunter Grass with a pipe stuck in his mouth and a blue beret flat on his head, Dario Fo, Nadine Gordimer in a coat to the ground like a Soviet commissar's, Jose Saramago-the spent volcanoes of the radical-chic Left.

This year's prize-winner for literature is V. S. Naipaul. In his acceptance speech, he sketched out the adventurous journey on which he has come since his birth in Trinidad into a family once brought from India as indentured laborers. Seemingly he should have been one among the anonymous and the dispossessed-the "poor"-destined never to make his mark on the world. But he wanted to write, and he worked at it. For him, as for a number of great writers, literature is also the process of self-discovery we all should make. Whoever applies himself, whoever uses his intellect, has it within him to become a free and creative man. Western civilization alone holds out this high ideal to every individual, as Naipaul likes to emphasize, and his-the new laureate's- is a rare voice to celebrate it.

In the pageant of these Stockholm days, we move from hotel to concert hall, to the prize-giving ceremony itself, to the unexpectedly Italianate city hall for an immense and stately banquet comprising 1,600 guests in full evening dress (and at least 200 waiters). The king and queen of Sweden and their ravishing daughter seem to have stepped out of a past when royalty was regal. The singers to entertain us are the peerless Anne Sofie von Otter and Bryn Terfel, and in the middle of the banquet the whole Stockholm opera company break in with scenes from Verdi's Masked Ball.

A humorous and self-possessed observer of everyone including himself, Naipaul was evidently moved to receive his prize. He rose to the occasion, and the occasion rose to him.