Patrick French’s authorised biography of V.S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is (Picador, Rs 595, 555 pp) gets early notices, most of them favourable. The Economist calls the book ‘penetrating’ and ‘unflinching’.
Patrick French takes the title of his life of V.S. Naipaul from the first sentence of “A Bend in the River”, one of the 2001 Nobel laureate’s best-known books: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” It is the kind of statement that makes liberal-minded readers recoil, almost instinctively. Each part of it is a provocation. But it encapsulates the man, his fear of the void, his contempt for the loser. And it is a reason for reading this penetrating, wide-ranging and unflinching biography.
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