Patrick French’s biography of V.S. Naipaul (The World is What it Is, 554 pp, Alfred A. Knopf, $30, ) hits American shores. In New York Times, Dwight Garner gives it his approval, calling it ’one of the sprightliest, most gripping, most intellectually curious and, well, funniest biographies of a living writer’.
Books about literary friendships (James and Wharton, Kerouac and Ginsberg, Melville and Hawthorne) drop into bookstores with numbing regularity. Books about literary revenge are more rare and thus more interesting.
In 1998 Paul Theroux published “Sir Vidia’s Shadow,” a memoir about the crumbling of his long friendship with V. S. Naipaul, the great Trinidad-born novelist. Mr. Theroux’s book was a potent, carefully mixed cocktail, served ice cold. It laid bare Mr. Naipaul’s racism, misogyny, vanity, stinginess and (most distressingly) his emotional cruelty to Patricia, his first wife.
Now, 10 years later, comes “The World Is What It Is,” Patrick French’s authorized biography of Mr. Naipaul. It’s a handsome volume, jacketed in silver and black, with a disarming cover photograph of Mr. Naipaul stooping, with a gap-toothed grin, to tie a loose shoelace.
Similar Posts:
- That Naipaul book
- Two lives, two memoirs
- Sir Vidia’s dance
- The lessons of the master
- Theroux on Naipaul
0 Responses to “Nobel Naipaul and his many enemies”
Leave a Reply