Nothing of Naipaul’s could compare with the first novel of his I read, A Bend in the River. One of the best novels of the 20C, it set me on a course to read everything by him that I could find. Though I eventually tired of his presence in much of his writing – fussy, arrogant, irritable, phobic – there is no denying his consistent quality and originality. This biography covers the genesis of his work to about 1996, when his much-abused wife died of cancer and he remarries immediately. It is a startlingly intimate portrait that Naipaul himself encouraged, a search for the truth by a supremely gifted biographer.
Naipaul was born relatively poor in Trinidad within a rich and ambitious family, though his father, a sometime journalist, was one of the lesser husbands and struggled to forge a path for himself. From the start, he stood out as singularly brilliant and won a scholarship to Oxford, where he excelled in literature. Upon graduation, he had a soul-crushing experience finding a job at the BBC – all good jobs seemed reserved for good English boys, not people of color – but once he had a situation as a broadcaster for Caribbean stories, he pursued writing as his only profession.
His wife, Pat, is the other major personality in the book. She served him as administrative assistant, first reader of his drafts, and emotional anchor, a kind of subordinated dependency. They married young and, due to inexperience and lack of chemistry, their sex life never satisfied Naipaul, who treated her terribly, hiring prostitutes and in mid-life finding a mistress in Argentina. She was long-suffering and self-effacing in the face of constant humiliation and belittlement. While they loved each other and had many tender moments, he is portrayed as a monster in this regard.
I give this background on his life because it was all used in his novels. This is not speculation, but from direct confirmation in journals and letters that French had access to as authorized biographer. His mistress, for example, was Yvette in A Bend in the River, the bored, rather dull woman who engaged the character in mid-life for sex that satisfied him completely for the first time and led to violence. The bio also extensively covers his travels, also substance for his novels that he manipulated in his imagination.
French constantly offers perceptive comments that explain Naipaul’s irascible nature, often in deep cultural context, such as the sparring and vicious infighting that went on in his extended family and what was typical of Caribbean manhood. I was in awe of his efforts in this regard. It almost can allow the reader to forgive Naipaul’s comments that seemed racist, misogynist, and indeed even colonialist. It is a truly dazzling performance.
As a critical biography, French also examines in great detail the substance of Naipaul’s major and minor works, presenting historical context, how innovative they were in a literary sense, and the contemporary issues that inspired them. Again, if you know Naipaul’s work well, this is the best thing that a critic can offer and French seems to have perfect pitch. Naipaul introduced many unique characters in his fiction, significantly widening the narratives available to general readers - the poor, the downtrodden, those with identity conflicts in societies that were not their own. His nonfiction was equally groundbreaking, looking to civilizational issues without the typical ideological lenses of the period (e.g. Marxism), instead with an extraordinarily fresh eye. His "history of nowhere" - the Loss of El Dorado - may stand as a monument to post-colonial literature.
Recommended with the greatest enthusiasm. This is first rate and has renewed my interest in this unusual literary genius. French writes critically of him, but also brings out Naipaul's humor, charisma, and simple hard work.
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The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul Hardcover – Deckle Edge, November 4, 2008
by
Patrick French
(Author)
| Patrick French (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
4.1 on Goodreads
474 ratings
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Since V. S. Naipaul left his Caribbean birthplace at the age of seventeen, his improbable life has followed the global movement of peoples, whose preeminent literary chronicler he has become. In The World Is What It Is, Patrick French offers the first authoritative biography of the controversial Nobel laureate, whose only stated ambition was greatness as a writer, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred.
Beginning with a richly detailed portrait of Naipaul’s childhood in colonial Trinidad, French gives us the boy born to an Indian family, the displaced soul in a displaced community, who by dint of talent and ambition finds the only imaginable way out: a scholarship to Oxford. London in the 1950s offers hope and his first literary success, but homesickness and depression almost defeat Vidia, his narrow escape aided by Patricia Hale, an Englishwoman who will devote herself to his work and well-being. She will stand by him, sometimes tenuously, for more than four decades, even as Naipaul embarks on a twenty-four-year affair, which will awaken half-dead passions and feed perhaps his greatest wave of dizzying creativity. Amid this harrowing emotional life, French traces the course of the fierce visionary impulse underlying Naipaul’s singular power, a gift to produce masterpieces of fiction and nonfiction.
Informed by exclusive access to V. S. Naipaul’s private papers and personal recollections, and by great feeling for his formidable body of work, French’s revelatory biography does full justice to an enigmatic genius.
Beginning with a richly detailed portrait of Naipaul’s childhood in colonial Trinidad, French gives us the boy born to an Indian family, the displaced soul in a displaced community, who by dint of talent and ambition finds the only imaginable way out: a scholarship to Oxford. London in the 1950s offers hope and his first literary success, but homesickness and depression almost defeat Vidia, his narrow escape aided by Patricia Hale, an Englishwoman who will devote herself to his work and well-being. She will stand by him, sometimes tenuously, for more than four decades, even as Naipaul embarks on a twenty-four-year affair, which will awaken half-dead passions and feed perhaps his greatest wave of dizzying creativity. Amid this harrowing emotional life, French traces the course of the fierce visionary impulse underlying Naipaul’s singular power, a gift to produce masterpieces of fiction and nonfiction.
Informed by exclusive access to V. S. Naipaul’s private papers and personal recollections, and by great feeling for his formidable body of work, French’s revelatory biography does full justice to an enigmatic genius.
- Print length576 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateNovember 4, 2008
- Dimensions6.6 x 1.73 x 9.53 inches
- ISBN-101400044057
- ISBN-13978-1400044054
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. V.S. Naipaul's biographer aims not to sit in judgment of the Nobel laureate, but to expose the subject with ruthless clarity to the calm eye of the reader. In this he succeeds admirably. Descendant of poor Brahmins, born in 1932 in Trinidad and educated in Oxford, Naipaul is haunted by matters of race, colonialism and sex. He is, says award-winning author French (Younghusband), both the racist (against those darker than he) and the victim of racial prejudice, tendencies that come through in his novels and in his treatment of friends and lovers. Haunting this biography are Naipaul's women. His wife, Pat, supported him, overlooked his affairs and his visits with prostitutes, and subordinated herself to his genius; Naipaul gave equally little to Margaret, his mistress. Naipaul and his books may be the subject of this work, but it is these and the other women whom he depended on and took for granted—from his editor to his mother—whose stories will keep that calm eye of the reader glued to the pages of this disturbing biography. 16 pages of photos. (Nov. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Reviewers were mostly astounded that such a good writer as V. S. Naipaul could be such a horrible person. Though he has always been known as prickly, critics seemed to compete for new adjectives to describe the man who emerges in this book. Michael Dirda's list: "whiney, narcissistic, insulting, needy, callous, impolite, cruel, vengeful, indecisive, miserly, exploitative, snobbish, sadistic, self-pitying and ungrateful." Patrick French, by contrast, earned quite positive labels for his well-written, warts-and-all biography. Yet critics agreed that Naipaul, despite the portrait of him that emerges here, has one remaining virtue. As the New York Times's Dwight Garner put it, Naipaul "was brave to allow this complicated parsing of his own myth into the world."
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Nobel laureate Naipaul’s readers know of his fierce intellect and literary prowess, his irascibility and pitiless condemnations. So how “authorized” was this living biography? And how did French cope? One should never underestimate a narcissist’s craving for attention, and French is fearlessly inquisitive. He is also a superb stylist who combines sharp observations with judicial analysis, a skill much in demand in portraying such a contrary, celebrated, and controversial man of letters. French sensitively documents Naipaul’s Trinidad childhood and the prejudice his immigrant Indian family faced as well as Naipaul’s paralyzing depression as an outsider in England. To understand Naipaul, one must understand his father, and French perceptively recounts Seepersad’s improbable rise as a journalist and his terrible fall. But it is the women in Naipul’s life who have empowered him and who make this such a riveting, heartbreaking biography. Patricia Hale defied her family to marry Naipaul, and sacrificed everything to support his literary quest, only to have her “Genius” fall passionately in love with a woman who was his conspicuous mistress for more than two decades. French’s deep respect for Pat infuses this sexually candid biography with sorrow, wonder, and dignity, and one can’t help but assume that this was the ever-wily, truth-seeking Naipaul’s secret intention. --Donna Seaman
Review
PRAISE FOR PATRICK FRENCH'S THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS
“A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth. V.S. Naipaul wanted his monument built while he was still alive, and, sticking to his own ruthless literary code, he was willing to pay the full price….Now Naipaul has his monument, “The World Is What It Is” is fully worthy of its subject, with all the dramatic pacing, the insight and the pathos of a first-rate novel. It is a magnificent tribute to the painful and unlikely struggled by which the grandson of indentured Indian workers, born in the small island colony of Trinidad, made himself into the greatest English novelist of the past half century. It is also a portrait of the artist as a monster. How these two judgments can be simultaneously true is one of this book’s central questions. Whether Naipaul himself understand the enormity of the story to which he contributed so much candor is another….rich narrative….impossible to put down….Pat’s voice is faltering and uncertain where Naipaul’s is relentlessly in command, but its small observations, evasions and sudden bolts of understanding haunt the reader up until her death of cancer, which gives this story its heartbreaking end.”
- George Packer, on the cover of the New York Times Book Review
“a prodigious achievement, a wonderful biography, a justification for the art of biography itself.”
- A. N. Wilson, Times Literary Supplement
“astonishing (and astonishingly authorized)….With the aid of this exhaustive and efficient biography, one can make some more-educated surmises about the connection between Naipaul’s rigidly maintained exterior and the many layers of insecurity…that underlie it….shrewd and intelligent.”
- Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic
“I doubted whether an honest book could be written by anyone while Naipaul was still alive. I was wrong. The truth is not skimped in Patrick French’s excellent book....The great merit of a superb biography, such as this one, is that it can deepen our understanding of the literary character by telling us more about its creator....French…gets it right.”
- Ian Buruma, The New York Review of Books
“extraordinary biography….French has handled an immense amount of materials with a deft hand, and the reader actually wishes he had extended the book’s 487 pages of text and pursued his subject pas 1996….authorized but not compromised….It’s hard to see how French could have been more objective if his subject had been dead for ten years….French is so thorough that it’s likely no further biography of Naipaul, at least one covering the first sixty-odd years of his life, will ever be needed….French is very good on Naipaul’s writing….The World Is What It Is adds depth and clarity to the discussion of Naipaul’s work….French has met his own rigorous standards and, one feels, Sir Vidia’s as well.”
- Allen Barra, Bookforum
“one of the sprightliest, most gripping, most intellectually curious, and well, funniest biographies of a living writer…to come along in years….Mr. French is a relative rarity among biographers, a real writer, and at his best he sounds like a combination of that wily bohemian Geoff Dyer and that wittily matter-of-factual cyborg Michael Kinsley. Even the cameos in Mr. French’s biography are crazily vivid….crafty and inquisitive book….Mr. French quickly and adroitly steps back to give us a wide-angled and morally complicated view….vivid prose….Mr. French writes with wit and feeling.”
- Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“nuanced and generous….distinguished biography, one that aims to understand rather than simplistically condone or chastise….a superb, clear-eyed study, always sympathetic, balanced and thoughtful, as well as rich in what Joseph Conrad called ‘the fascination of the abomination.’”
- Michael Dirda, Washington Post
“extraordinary….Patrick French shrewdly…give[s] us an idea of…the world Naipaul had to join and beat….full of intimate and moving revelations…thrilling pages….masterly, mournful book…hideously just.”
- James Wood, The New Yorker
“candid….well-researched and fair-minded….French skews nothing and…illuminate[s] aspects of a life full of entanglements and opposing selves.”
- Alexander Theroux, Boston Sunday Globe
“shrewd and honest…[French is] a writer not given to extremes….French is a graceful, confident and subtle writer….offers a vivid, and sometimes enthralling, portrait of a deeply enigmatic writer….rich account….French skillfully evokes the atmosphere of political turmoil and transition….with brio and wit….French is alive to the nuances, quirks and contradictions in Naipaul’s character, and he has an acute sense of his subject’s displacement and rootlessness….a formidable achievement….contains a remarkable accumulation of rich, minute detail; covers a vast amount of history and politics in an effortless manner; and navigates difficult emotional territory with a very high degree of compassion, subtlety and authority….engrossing, with French pulling surprises out of his hat from the opening pages.”
- Scott Sherman, The Nation
“shocking moments…startling candor…as haunting and harrowing a psychological document as you could ask for….French pursues his prey with an acuity worthy of the man himself….The particular achievement of The World is to flesh out the two potent forces that Naipaul has often seemed to repress: women and Trinidad, where he grew up….French grippingly develops an account of the writer’s life as cool and undeluded as Naipaul’s former friend Paul Theroux’s was rivetingly emotional….French is …as plainspoken as his subject.”
- Pico Iyer, Time
“perhaps the most shockingly ‘authorized’ biography in the history of authorized biographies….French handles the incendiary material with novelistic subtlety and grace.”
- Sam Anderson, New York Magazine
“a major achievement….harrowing….frank ….Naipaul’s work will inevitably be read differently in light of this biography.”
- Floyd Skloot, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“sweeping ….Highly recommended.”
- Stacy Russo, Library Journal
PRAISE FROM THE UK FOR PATRICK FRENCH'S THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS
longlisted for the prestigious BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction
“French’s character analysis is not flattering, but it does justice to its subject’s complexity….French’s book is a magnificent achievement….But the achievement is partly Naipaul’s. For he did not have to agree to these conditions, or speak to French so openly. He has chosen to submit himself to the truth-telling and ruthless objectivity that have always characterised his own work.”
- John Cary, The Sunday Times
“penetrating, wide-ranging and unflinching biography….The closing pages…are enough to draw tears.”
- The Economist
“He has written a biography of a living person that is every bit as honest, perceptive, compelling and plain good as if his subject was dead. It is a masterly performance, and if a better biography is published this year, I shall be astonished….It is rare to wish that a biography running to over 500 pages was longer, but this is an exception.”
- Allan Massie, Literary Review
“French’s character analysis is not flattering, but it does justice to its subject’s complexity….French’s book is a magnificent achievement….But the achievement is partly Naipaul’s. For he did not have to agree to these conditions, or speak to French so openly. He has chosen to submit himself to the truth-telling and ruthless objectivity that have always characterised his own work.”
- John Cary, The Sunday Times
“penetrating, wide-ranging and unflinching biography….The closing pages…are enough to draw tears.”
- The Economist
“Patrick French has brought off something very difficult, so difficult indeed that I would have thought it impossible. He has written a biography of a living person that is every bit as honest, perceptive, compelling and plain good as if his subject was dead. It is a masterly performance, and if a better biography is published this year, I shall be astonished….It is rare to wish that a biography running to over 500 pages was longer, but this is an exception.”
- Allan Massie, Literary Review
“a brilliant biography: exemplary in its thoroughness, sympathetic but tough in tone. Against Naipaul’s own increasing ‘tendency to caricature himself in public,’ and against the distortions peddled by snubbed friends and ideological enemies, French has set down a complex and credible portrait. Reading it I was enthralled — and frequently amused (how incredibly funny Naipaul can be!). I was also continually aware of a great and unrelenting pressure on the developing writer; it suffuses the book like suspense….lovely to read….French’s accounts…have their own entertainment value...”
- Sebastian Smee, Spectator
“Patrick French’s brilliant and candid The World Is What It Is lays bare the demons that drove one of our greatest — and most controversial ...
“A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth. V.S. Naipaul wanted his monument built while he was still alive, and, sticking to his own ruthless literary code, he was willing to pay the full price….Now Naipaul has his monument, “The World Is What It Is” is fully worthy of its subject, with all the dramatic pacing, the insight and the pathos of a first-rate novel. It is a magnificent tribute to the painful and unlikely struggled by which the grandson of indentured Indian workers, born in the small island colony of Trinidad, made himself into the greatest English novelist of the past half century. It is also a portrait of the artist as a monster. How these two judgments can be simultaneously true is one of this book’s central questions. Whether Naipaul himself understand the enormity of the story to which he contributed so much candor is another….rich narrative….impossible to put down….Pat’s voice is faltering and uncertain where Naipaul’s is relentlessly in command, but its small observations, evasions and sudden bolts of understanding haunt the reader up until her death of cancer, which gives this story its heartbreaking end.”
- George Packer, on the cover of the New York Times Book Review
“a prodigious achievement, a wonderful biography, a justification for the art of biography itself.”
- A. N. Wilson, Times Literary Supplement
“astonishing (and astonishingly authorized)….With the aid of this exhaustive and efficient biography, one can make some more-educated surmises about the connection between Naipaul’s rigidly maintained exterior and the many layers of insecurity…that underlie it….shrewd and intelligent.”
- Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic
“I doubted whether an honest book could be written by anyone while Naipaul was still alive. I was wrong. The truth is not skimped in Patrick French’s excellent book....The great merit of a superb biography, such as this one, is that it can deepen our understanding of the literary character by telling us more about its creator....French…gets it right.”
- Ian Buruma, The New York Review of Books
“extraordinary biography….French has handled an immense amount of materials with a deft hand, and the reader actually wishes he had extended the book’s 487 pages of text and pursued his subject pas 1996….authorized but not compromised….It’s hard to see how French could have been more objective if his subject had been dead for ten years….French is so thorough that it’s likely no further biography of Naipaul, at least one covering the first sixty-odd years of his life, will ever be needed….French is very good on Naipaul’s writing….The World Is What It Is adds depth and clarity to the discussion of Naipaul’s work….French has met his own rigorous standards and, one feels, Sir Vidia’s as well.”
- Allen Barra, Bookforum
“one of the sprightliest, most gripping, most intellectually curious, and well, funniest biographies of a living writer…to come along in years….Mr. French is a relative rarity among biographers, a real writer, and at his best he sounds like a combination of that wily bohemian Geoff Dyer and that wittily matter-of-factual cyborg Michael Kinsley. Even the cameos in Mr. French’s biography are crazily vivid….crafty and inquisitive book….Mr. French quickly and adroitly steps back to give us a wide-angled and morally complicated view….vivid prose….Mr. French writes with wit and feeling.”
- Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“nuanced and generous….distinguished biography, one that aims to understand rather than simplistically condone or chastise….a superb, clear-eyed study, always sympathetic, balanced and thoughtful, as well as rich in what Joseph Conrad called ‘the fascination of the abomination.’”
- Michael Dirda, Washington Post
“extraordinary….Patrick French shrewdly…give[s] us an idea of…the world Naipaul had to join and beat….full of intimate and moving revelations…thrilling pages….masterly, mournful book…hideously just.”
- James Wood, The New Yorker
“candid….well-researched and fair-minded….French skews nothing and…illuminate[s] aspects of a life full of entanglements and opposing selves.”
- Alexander Theroux, Boston Sunday Globe
“shrewd and honest…[French is] a writer not given to extremes….French is a graceful, confident and subtle writer….offers a vivid, and sometimes enthralling, portrait of a deeply enigmatic writer….rich account….French skillfully evokes the atmosphere of political turmoil and transition….with brio and wit….French is alive to the nuances, quirks and contradictions in Naipaul’s character, and he has an acute sense of his subject’s displacement and rootlessness….a formidable achievement….contains a remarkable accumulation of rich, minute detail; covers a vast amount of history and politics in an effortless manner; and navigates difficult emotional territory with a very high degree of compassion, subtlety and authority….engrossing, with French pulling surprises out of his hat from the opening pages.”
- Scott Sherman, The Nation
“shocking moments…startling candor…as haunting and harrowing a psychological document as you could ask for….French pursues his prey with an acuity worthy of the man himself….The particular achievement of The World is to flesh out the two potent forces that Naipaul has often seemed to repress: women and Trinidad, where he grew up….French grippingly develops an account of the writer’s life as cool and undeluded as Naipaul’s former friend Paul Theroux’s was rivetingly emotional….French is …as plainspoken as his subject.”
- Pico Iyer, Time
“perhaps the most shockingly ‘authorized’ biography in the history of authorized biographies….French handles the incendiary material with novelistic subtlety and grace.”
- Sam Anderson, New York Magazine
“a major achievement….harrowing….frank ….Naipaul’s work will inevitably be read differently in light of this biography.”
- Floyd Skloot, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“sweeping ….Highly recommended.”
- Stacy Russo, Library Journal
PRAISE FROM THE UK FOR PATRICK FRENCH'S THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS
longlisted for the prestigious BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction
“French’s character analysis is not flattering, but it does justice to its subject’s complexity….French’s book is a magnificent achievement….But the achievement is partly Naipaul’s. For he did not have to agree to these conditions, or speak to French so openly. He has chosen to submit himself to the truth-telling and ruthless objectivity that have always characterised his own work.”
- John Cary, The Sunday Times
“penetrating, wide-ranging and unflinching biography….The closing pages…are enough to draw tears.”
- The Economist
“He has written a biography of a living person that is every bit as honest, perceptive, compelling and plain good as if his subject was dead. It is a masterly performance, and if a better biography is published this year, I shall be astonished….It is rare to wish that a biography running to over 500 pages was longer, but this is an exception.”
- Allan Massie, Literary Review
“French’s character analysis is not flattering, but it does justice to its subject’s complexity….French’s book is a magnificent achievement….But the achievement is partly Naipaul’s. For he did not have to agree to these conditions, or speak to French so openly. He has chosen to submit himself to the truth-telling and ruthless objectivity that have always characterised his own work.”
- John Cary, The Sunday Times
“penetrating, wide-ranging and unflinching biography….The closing pages…are enough to draw tears.”
- The Economist
“Patrick French has brought off something very difficult, so difficult indeed that I would have thought it impossible. He has written a biography of a living person that is every bit as honest, perceptive, compelling and plain good as if his subject was dead. It is a masterly performance, and if a better biography is published this year, I shall be astonished….It is rare to wish that a biography running to over 500 pages was longer, but this is an exception.”
- Allan Massie, Literary Review
“a brilliant biography: exemplary in its thoroughness, sympathetic but tough in tone. Against Naipaul’s own increasing ‘tendency to caricature himself in public,’ and against the distortions peddled by snubbed friends and ideological enemies, French has set down a complex and credible portrait. Reading it I was enthralled — and frequently amused (how incredibly funny Naipaul can be!). I was also continually aware of a great and unrelenting pressure on the developing writer; it suffuses the book like suspense….lovely to read….French’s accounts…have their own entertainment value...”
- Sebastian Smee, Spectator
“Patrick French’s brilliant and candid The World Is What It Is lays bare the demons that drove one of our greatest — and most controversial ...
About the Author
Patrick French was born in England in 1966 and studied literature at Edinburgh University. He is the author of Younghusband, Liberty or Death and Tibet, Tibet, and is a winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Michael Dirda V.S. Naipaul established himself as an important writer before he was 30, publishing a handful of fine and often sadly comic novels about his native Trinidad, among these his early masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). This early flowering was followed by a 25-year period when his nonfiction -- chiefly reports on the cultural and political Zeitgeists of India, Africa, the Caribbean and South America -- revealed him to be something of a modern-day Tocqueville. Like the author of Democracy in America, Naipaul could grasp the essence of a society or historical moment with uncanny precision and express that essence in beautiful, ice-water clear prose. (See, for example, An Area of Darkness, 1964, and The Return of Eva Peron, 1980.) During this period, Naipaul also continued to write fiction but with less frequency, though in his late 40s he produced his most admired novel, A Bend in the River (1979), a masterly Conradian vision of politics, sex and culture in modern-day Africa. Since then his writing, in whatever genre, has grown increasingly idiosyncratic, sometimes even formless and tendentious. That, in précis, is the public career. The young and gifted Naipaul worked hard and gradually achieved literary eminence, wealth and fame through the power of his pen. On the surface, then, his life is a kind of fairy tale, in which the dark-skinned, Oxford scholarship boy from Trinidad steadily gathers up all the glittering prizes, including a knighthood in 1990 and the Nobel for literature in 2001. Certainly, Naipaul deserves his acclaim -- as a writer. His prose is rightly esteemed for its simplicity, beauty and power; his vision of the world duly praised (or vilified) for its fierce honesty. But what of the private man? That's another matter. As Patrick French's nuanced and generous but often dispiriting biography shows, there's not much to like or praise about V.S. Naipaul as a human being. He starts life as a twerp, then fairly quickly becomes a jerk and ends up an old sourpuss. The best overall epithet for him is infantile -- though one shouldn't neglect the claims of such adjectives as whiney, narcissistic, insulting, needy, callous, impolite, cruel, vengeful, indecisive, miserly, exploitative, snobbish, sadistic, self-pitying and ungrateful. Of course, his is, to some extent, the modern artistic sensibility writ very, very large. But even our favorite monsters and divas -- Picasso, Waugh, Callas, Brando -- are never as smarmy and nasty as Naipaul. He can make a spoiled 3-year-old look mature. Nonetheless, according to French and such one-time friends as Paul Theroux, the young Vidia really could be humorous and charming, and he seems to have been the indulged pet of the English literary and social establishment. On his travels, surprisingly, Naipaul also shows a rare ability to win the confidence and help of other people -- not that he is a person one could ever actually trust. Writers, as Joan Didion once said, are always betraying someone. To all appearances, Naipaul's only loyalties are to his art. Vidyadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in 1932 in the British island colony of Trinidad. His family, racially East Indian, was solidly middle-class, owning shops, a big house and even a quarry. Naipaul's father, however, worked as a journalist and dreamt of a writing career, eventually producing one admired book of island stories -- Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales -- and later serving his adoring son as the model for Mr. Biswas. The adolescent Naipaul was shy, intellectually ambitious and, according to one of his sister's, a "wimp," utterly unsure of himself around girls. After attending school at the prestigious Queen's Royal College, he competed for one of three scholarships to England, and came in fourth. But there was apparently some mix-up over Naipaul's exam, and it was decided to allow him a grant after all. At Oxford the brilliant provincial failed to shine. He complained about the cold, the food (he was a vegetarian who occasionally ate chicken), racial prejudice, his fellow Indians and Trinidadians, almost everything. No doubt he had cause. It couldn't have been easy being a "wog," a "nigger" in 1950s Britain. Still, Naipaul managed to win the affection, then love of undergraduate Patricia Hale, whom he eventually married. Unfortunately, their sex life was temperate at best, and before long the repressed but lustful husband began to visit prostitutes regularly. Nonetheless, Naipaul needed the mothering and comfort that Pat delivered, and she, in her turn, dutifully believed in him and his genius for the rest of her generally wretched life. As the years went by, Naipaul increasingly treated her as little more than a servant. There were no children. After Oxford (where he gained only a second-class degree and failed his post-graduate B.Litt), Naipaul eventually landed a job working for the radio program "Caribbean Voices," a position that allowed him to hone his skills as a writer and journalist. In relatively short order, he produced the colorful Trinidadian stories that became Miguel Street (1959), which won the Somerset Maugham Award, as well as the comic novels The Mystic Masseur (1957), recipient of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), which garnered accolades from Anthony Powell, among others; and his Dickensian masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas. When Naipaul brought out his first work of nonfiction, a study of the Caribbean called The Middle Passage (1962), that connoisseur of the classical style, Evelyn Waugh, applauded its author's "exquisite mastery of the English language." Naipaul was hardly out of his dazzlingly productive 20s. Despite these prizes and rising critical esteem, the Naipauls remained relatively poor, and Pat often seems to have drudged at pick-up teaching jobs to pay the rent. But Naipaul's 1964 book on India, An Area of Darkness, finally established his bona fides as a political observer and gadfly. Before long, there were repeated assignments from the New York Review of Books and other publications to report on the post-colonial third world, from Africa to South America. It was while he was in Buenos Aires that Naipaul was introduced to an Anglo-Argentine woman named Margaret Murray. Murray was married and bored, had run through earlier lovers and casually submitted to the writer's impulsive attentions. Before long, the two had fallen into a serious sadomasochistic relationship, Murray eventually declaring herself Naipaul's slave and his penis her god. The hitherto sexually backward wimp in heavy Clark Kent glasses took full advantage of this rapt obeisance. Murray left her husband and three children, repeatedly abased herself in love letters (some of which Naipaul never bothered to open) and even entered into a temporary sexual arrangement with a banker just for a free trip to England to visit her sadistic master. Their carnal games could grow rough, and sometimes Naipaul actually beat her, once bruising her face so badly that she couldn't go out in public. For 25 years the writer encouraged this folie a deux, which verged on a ménage a trois after he told Pat about his mistress. Of course, he framed his confession in such a way as to make it seem that he deserved the real sympathy -- he was cruelly distraught, the emotional turmoil interfered with his work, etc. etc. Pat stayed with him because he needed her. Then after she died from cancer in 1996, Sir Vidia -- as he now was -- threw over the long-suffering Murray and two months later married Nadira Alvi, a Pakistani journalist. French's biography ends at this point. Now in his late 70s, Naipaul has in recent years come to seem increasingly blimpish, less a cultural scourge than a mean-spirited, intolerant crank. He has likened Africans and Indians to monkeys, asserted that there are no great writers any more, broken with friends and repeatedly insulted strangers. French tries to explain such behavior as savage indignation à la Swift or typically mischievous Trinidadian humor. Perhaps. To most people, though, it's just boorishness. Of course, none of this affects the books; they stand on their own considerable merits, especially those published before 1985. Later work, such as the novel Magic Seeds (2004), can be rambling and self-indulgent, or repeat themes better treated earlier. Nonetheless, as a distinguished novelist, Naipaul merits this comparably distinguished biography, one that aims to understand rather than simplistically condone or chastise. French was permitted access to all of Naipaul's papers, and while his book is "authorized," its subject exercised no review or censorship over its often unflattering content. How should one interpret this? As a genuine desire by Naipaul to be remembered in all his complexity? As a sign of smug self-confidence? As utter indifference to people's approval? Perhaps all three. In any case, The World Is What It Is -- the title derives from the desolate opening words of A Bend in the River -- is a superb, clear-eyed study, always sympathetic, balanced and thoughtful, as well as rich in what Joseph Conrad called "the fascination of the abomination."
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The New World
The islands of the Caribbean dot and dash their way through the sea, linking different worlds. Central America joins the southern and northern hemispheres, taking you up through Colombia, Panama and Nicaragua by the land route until you reach Mexico, or down through the shallows of the Atlantic from Florida to the Bahamas, skirting Cuba and Jamaica, passing Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, until you find yourself in the sprayed arc of islands known as the Lesser Antilles, some no more than a few miles across: Anguilla, Sint Maarten, Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia, Martinique, Grenada. At the tip of the chain lies a larger island which, beneath the sea or geologically, is part of the South American mainland. Almost square, with a low promontory at its south-western corner pointing to Venezuela, this is Trinidad.
In the summer of 1498, three ships approached the shores of the island. The men on board were exhausted and burned by the sun, surviving off raisins, salt pork and sea biscuits, their supply of water running low. They were led by a white-haired voyager in his forties named Christoforo Colombo, known also as Christóbal Colón or Christopher Columbus. He was ill, his body inflamed and his eyes bleeding. It was Columbus’s third voyage in search of Asia, and the one on which his future depended. A few months earlier, Vasco da Gama had reached Calicut, opening Europe’s sea route to India. Renowned for his acute sense of smell, Columbus would have drunk in the lush, flowering vegetation of the island with its easy, humid, tropical climate, home to rainforests of bamboo and hardwood, flashing birds like the silver-beaked tanager, rivers, waterfalls and an array of caymans, snakes and beasts such as the nine-banded armadillo. There were no cocoa estates, no sugar-cane plantations, no breadfruit trees; Captain Bligh had yet to bring them from Tahiti. The only inhabitants were families of Amerindians who lived by farming and fishing, having paddled across the sea from the Orinoco river delta many centuries before.
Seeing three ranges of mountains running across the island, Columbus named it La Isla de la Trinidad after the Holy Trinity, in the Christian way. Later that day his sailors landed on the south coast to take on fresh water—the moment of first contact. Over the following weeks they navigated neighbouring waters, and became the first Europeans to see the mainland of South America, the fresh green breast of the New World. Columbus suspected as he charted the wide mouth of the Orinoco river that he was on the edge of a continent rather than another island. With his health failing, he ordered his ships to sail north through the stretch of water between Trinidad and the mainland—the Gulf of Paria—until they reached the island of Margarita.
The outbreak of the sixteenth century brought adventurers to the island of Trinidad, who enslaved the indigenous Amerindians and sent them to work in Spanish colonies overseas. The old world disappeared: land was stolen, new settlements were made. The English, Dutch, French and Spanish all battled and schemed for supremacy in the islands of the West Indies. Using the legal formalities of the time, local chiefs lost their inheritance and power. Sir Walter Raleigh, an English marauder who raided Trinidad in 1595, found five desperate, dispossessed men in the custody of the Spaniards. They turned out to be “the last aboriginal rulers of the land, held together on one chain, scalded with hot bacon fat, and broken by other punishments.”
Nearly three centuries after the appearance of Columbus, Trinidad had barely been colonized. By 1783 it had 126 whites, 259 free coloureds, 310 African slaves and 2,032 Amerindians.3 To encourage settlement, King Charles III of Spain offered land and tax breaks. Roman Catholics of French descent moved from neighbouring islands, accompanied by their slaves, and started farming cocoa, tobacco, cotton and sugar. By 1797, when the Spanish surrendered Trinidad to the British during the French Revolutionary Wars, the population had risen to just under 18,000. In the nineteenth century, migrants flooded in, and by 1900 there were around 300,000 inhabitants. Unlike most other islands in the West Indies, the people of Trinidad came from many different places: there were Africans who spoke French creole or Yoruba, sailors and indentured labourers from China, neighbouring Venezuelans, German and French labourers, Syrian and Lebanese business families, wanderers from Grenada and Barbados, residual Amerindians, visitors from Madeira, demobbed black British army veterans, Portuguese and Spanish-speaking farmers of uncertain ethnicity and free slaves from the United States. Most Caribbean islands were homogenous by comparison, with white planters and black slaves, but Trinidad was uniquely and enduringly ethnically complex. Even its place names were various: Amerindian (Chaguanas), Spanish (San Fernando), French (Sans Souci) and British (Poole).
When slavery was formally abolished across the British empire in 1834 and cheap labour was needed for the sugar-cane plantations, malnourished Indians were shipped over from Calcutta and Madras. While the white planters of the West Indies had grown rich on sugar cane, their cousins in India had made fortunes from land revenues; and many beautiful houses were built in the English countryside. North India, under British control, was awash with dislocated, landless peasants. A voyage across the oceans and a stint as a bonded or indentured labourer was an alternative to destitution. In Trinidad, the newly arrived East Indians were nervous of the alien society in which they found themselves. They feared the island’s black majority: Negroes seemed physically stronger, had rough manners and their dark skin identified them with the lower castes of Hinduism. The Negroes, for their part, came to regard these East Indians as heathens with peculiar customs who kept to themselves, were mean with money, cooked strange food and were servile to the plantation owners. Black agricultural labourers found their wages being undercut. They looked down on the Indians, who had to work long hours in the cane fields, as the “new slaves.”
Christmas 1894: Picture the tropical island of Trinidad with its sandy beaches, bursting coconuts, leaping howler monkeys and freshwater mangrove swamps teeming with scarlet ibis. A ship approaches Nelson Island, a parched limestone islet overlooking the capital, Port of Spain. The passengers who have survived the three-month sea voyage from Calcutta are loaded into open rowing boats. Quickly, the holding barrack is filled with men, women and children, their names recorded in a ledger under the supervision of a government official, the Protector of Immigrants. Their possessions are fumigated. They are housed, both sexes, in a long shed lined with wooden bunks filled with hay, infested with mosquitoes and sandflies. Most are Hindus, driven to flight by starvation or debt or trickery. All are desperate. They do not even know where they have come to; all they know is the name of the hot place to which they have been shipped, transposed into Hindi as “Chinitat.” Soon, an overseer will come from a plantation and indenture them as estate labourers, or coolies. The Handbook of Trinidad and Tobago states that when visiting the colony, “Elaborate tropical outfits are not necessary . . . For ladies, the same clothes as would be worn during a hot English summer are suitable all the year round.” Photographs of these new arrivals from India show them dressed almost in rags: a kurta and dhoti and light turban for the men, or a sari with the pallu, or tail, of the sari draped over the head in modesty for the women. These broken-down, thin-limbed immigrants with their tiny bundles of possessions can only have made the journey to Trinidad as a last resort.
One man among the many—his name recorded as Kopil—is a Brahmin, from a family of hereditary pundits in a village near Gorakhpur on the Nepalese border with India. He has pretended to be from a different background, since the recruiter back in India told him he might not be accepted as a labourer if he admits to being from the highest caste. For thirteen generations, Kopil’s family have presided over the religious destiny of their neighbourhood, reading the Sanskrit texts and lecturing on spiritual practice to those who seek enlightenment. Wishing to study, he had walked south to Benares, the sacred Hindu city on the banks of the Ganges, where he met a recruiter who told him stories about the Caribbean, and how in this far-off place he would be given a gold coin each day as a reward for sifting sugar. If Kopil emigrated, he might even want to have a broad canvas belt made in which to store the gold coins. He is brought to a depot in Calcutta, and taken aboard the ship Hereford. At once, he feels his difference from the other immigrants. On board ship, he finds a piece of beef in his food. Although the voyage is terrible (forty people die from an outbreak of cholera, their corpses thrown overboard) Kopil starves himself for two days in horror at this contamination by cow meat, until the surgeon-superintendent intervenes and he is given a separate daily ration of raw potatoes and rice, which he cooks himself.
He reaches an island far from the large country and ancient civilization he has left behind. It is Kopil’s misfortune to be indentured to Woodford Lodge in Chaguanas, an estate in central Trinidad where the regime is especially severe. Each morning, to preserve his caste identity, he sets his own pot of khitchri—rice and spiced lentils—on an earthen oven before going to work. Kopil is assigned to the shovel gang, to digging and planting. It breaks him. He is put on the weeding gang with the women and children, and later made responsible for clearing the dung from the animal pens, a sweeper’s job. Kopil’s health breaks. He is twenty-one years old, alo...
The islands of the Caribbean dot and dash their way through the sea, linking different worlds. Central America joins the southern and northern hemispheres, taking you up through Colombia, Panama and Nicaragua by the land route until you reach Mexico, or down through the shallows of the Atlantic from Florida to the Bahamas, skirting Cuba and Jamaica, passing Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, until you find yourself in the sprayed arc of islands known as the Lesser Antilles, some no more than a few miles across: Anguilla, Sint Maarten, Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia, Martinique, Grenada. At the tip of the chain lies a larger island which, beneath the sea or geologically, is part of the South American mainland. Almost square, with a low promontory at its south-western corner pointing to Venezuela, this is Trinidad.
In the summer of 1498, three ships approached the shores of the island. The men on board were exhausted and burned by the sun, surviving off raisins, salt pork and sea biscuits, their supply of water running low. They were led by a white-haired voyager in his forties named Christoforo Colombo, known also as Christóbal Colón or Christopher Columbus. He was ill, his body inflamed and his eyes bleeding. It was Columbus’s third voyage in search of Asia, and the one on which his future depended. A few months earlier, Vasco da Gama had reached Calicut, opening Europe’s sea route to India. Renowned for his acute sense of smell, Columbus would have drunk in the lush, flowering vegetation of the island with its easy, humid, tropical climate, home to rainforests of bamboo and hardwood, flashing birds like the silver-beaked tanager, rivers, waterfalls and an array of caymans, snakes and beasts such as the nine-banded armadillo. There were no cocoa estates, no sugar-cane plantations, no breadfruit trees; Captain Bligh had yet to bring them from Tahiti. The only inhabitants were families of Amerindians who lived by farming and fishing, having paddled across the sea from the Orinoco river delta many centuries before.
Seeing three ranges of mountains running across the island, Columbus named it La Isla de la Trinidad after the Holy Trinity, in the Christian way. Later that day his sailors landed on the south coast to take on fresh water—the moment of first contact. Over the following weeks they navigated neighbouring waters, and became the first Europeans to see the mainland of South America, the fresh green breast of the New World. Columbus suspected as he charted the wide mouth of the Orinoco river that he was on the edge of a continent rather than another island. With his health failing, he ordered his ships to sail north through the stretch of water between Trinidad and the mainland—the Gulf of Paria—until they reached the island of Margarita.
The outbreak of the sixteenth century brought adventurers to the island of Trinidad, who enslaved the indigenous Amerindians and sent them to work in Spanish colonies overseas. The old world disappeared: land was stolen, new settlements were made. The English, Dutch, French and Spanish all battled and schemed for supremacy in the islands of the West Indies. Using the legal formalities of the time, local chiefs lost their inheritance and power. Sir Walter Raleigh, an English marauder who raided Trinidad in 1595, found five desperate, dispossessed men in the custody of the Spaniards. They turned out to be “the last aboriginal rulers of the land, held together on one chain, scalded with hot bacon fat, and broken by other punishments.”
Nearly three centuries after the appearance of Columbus, Trinidad had barely been colonized. By 1783 it had 126 whites, 259 free coloureds, 310 African slaves and 2,032 Amerindians.3 To encourage settlement, King Charles III of Spain offered land and tax breaks. Roman Catholics of French descent moved from neighbouring islands, accompanied by their slaves, and started farming cocoa, tobacco, cotton and sugar. By 1797, when the Spanish surrendered Trinidad to the British during the French Revolutionary Wars, the population had risen to just under 18,000. In the nineteenth century, migrants flooded in, and by 1900 there were around 300,000 inhabitants. Unlike most other islands in the West Indies, the people of Trinidad came from many different places: there were Africans who spoke French creole or Yoruba, sailors and indentured labourers from China, neighbouring Venezuelans, German and French labourers, Syrian and Lebanese business families, wanderers from Grenada and Barbados, residual Amerindians, visitors from Madeira, demobbed black British army veterans, Portuguese and Spanish-speaking farmers of uncertain ethnicity and free slaves from the United States. Most Caribbean islands were homogenous by comparison, with white planters and black slaves, but Trinidad was uniquely and enduringly ethnically complex. Even its place names were various: Amerindian (Chaguanas), Spanish (San Fernando), French (Sans Souci) and British (Poole).
When slavery was formally abolished across the British empire in 1834 and cheap labour was needed for the sugar-cane plantations, malnourished Indians were shipped over from Calcutta and Madras. While the white planters of the West Indies had grown rich on sugar cane, their cousins in India had made fortunes from land revenues; and many beautiful houses were built in the English countryside. North India, under British control, was awash with dislocated, landless peasants. A voyage across the oceans and a stint as a bonded or indentured labourer was an alternative to destitution. In Trinidad, the newly arrived East Indians were nervous of the alien society in which they found themselves. They feared the island’s black majority: Negroes seemed physically stronger, had rough manners and their dark skin identified them with the lower castes of Hinduism. The Negroes, for their part, came to regard these East Indians as heathens with peculiar customs who kept to themselves, were mean with money, cooked strange food and were servile to the plantation owners. Black agricultural labourers found their wages being undercut. They looked down on the Indians, who had to work long hours in the cane fields, as the “new slaves.”
Christmas 1894: Picture the tropical island of Trinidad with its sandy beaches, bursting coconuts, leaping howler monkeys and freshwater mangrove swamps teeming with scarlet ibis. A ship approaches Nelson Island, a parched limestone islet overlooking the capital, Port of Spain. The passengers who have survived the three-month sea voyage from Calcutta are loaded into open rowing boats. Quickly, the holding barrack is filled with men, women and children, their names recorded in a ledger under the supervision of a government official, the Protector of Immigrants. Their possessions are fumigated. They are housed, both sexes, in a long shed lined with wooden bunks filled with hay, infested with mosquitoes and sandflies. Most are Hindus, driven to flight by starvation or debt or trickery. All are desperate. They do not even know where they have come to; all they know is the name of the hot place to which they have been shipped, transposed into Hindi as “Chinitat.” Soon, an overseer will come from a plantation and indenture them as estate labourers, or coolies. The Handbook of Trinidad and Tobago states that when visiting the colony, “Elaborate tropical outfits are not necessary . . . For ladies, the same clothes as would be worn during a hot English summer are suitable all the year round.” Photographs of these new arrivals from India show them dressed almost in rags: a kurta and dhoti and light turban for the men, or a sari with the pallu, or tail, of the sari draped over the head in modesty for the women. These broken-down, thin-limbed immigrants with their tiny bundles of possessions can only have made the journey to Trinidad as a last resort.
One man among the many—his name recorded as Kopil—is a Brahmin, from a family of hereditary pundits in a village near Gorakhpur on the Nepalese border with India. He has pretended to be from a different background, since the recruiter back in India told him he might not be accepted as a labourer if he admits to being from the highest caste. For thirteen generations, Kopil’s family have presided over the religious destiny of their neighbourhood, reading the Sanskrit texts and lecturing on spiritual practice to those who seek enlightenment. Wishing to study, he had walked south to Benares, the sacred Hindu city on the banks of the Ganges, where he met a recruiter who told him stories about the Caribbean, and how in this far-off place he would be given a gold coin each day as a reward for sifting sugar. If Kopil emigrated, he might even want to have a broad canvas belt made in which to store the gold coins. He is brought to a depot in Calcutta, and taken aboard the ship Hereford. At once, he feels his difference from the other immigrants. On board ship, he finds a piece of beef in his food. Although the voyage is terrible (forty people die from an outbreak of cholera, their corpses thrown overboard) Kopil starves himself for two days in horror at this contamination by cow meat, until the surgeon-superintendent intervenes and he is given a separate daily ration of raw potatoes and rice, which he cooks himself.
He reaches an island far from the large country and ancient civilization he has left behind. It is Kopil’s misfortune to be indentured to Woodford Lodge in Chaguanas, an estate in central Trinidad where the regime is especially severe. Each morning, to preserve his caste identity, he sets his own pot of khitchri—rice and spiced lentils—on an earthen oven before going to work. Kopil is assigned to the shovel gang, to digging and planting. It breaks him. He is put on the weeding gang with the women and children, and later made responsible for clearing the dung from the animal pens, a sweeper’s job. Kopil’s health breaks. He is twenty-one years old, alo...
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- Publisher : Knopf (November 4, 2008)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 576 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1400044057
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400044054
- Item Weight : 2.12 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.6 x 1.73 x 9.53 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #976,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,345 in Author Biographies
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The best critical bio – of a difficult, complicated, great writer – that I have ever read.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 1, 2022Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 20, 2008
There was never a better example of art transcending life than the writing of V.S. Naipaul. After reading Naipaul's biography, you'll be certain you know more about a really bad person than you want to know, and yet, you won't be able to deny he wrote some very good books.
Naipaul is, by his own confession, a wretched human being. How wretched? In his early life he works hard and subjegates everything and everyone around him to his craft. But in mid-life something starts to happen and he sputters. He reawakens his creative impulse by having a 24 year long affair with a woman, Margarita, whom he beats during sex, rapes, throws shoes at, ignores and mistreats. His wife knows about this affair because Naipaul tells her. But he tells her because the affair is making him miserable and he wants his wife's sympathy. Margarita aborts at least three of Naipaul's children, leaves her husband and children-all on promises Naipaul makes to her and never keeps. Because she lives in Buenos Aires and Naipaul lives in England, Naipaul and Margarita's sexual get-togethers are difficult and expensive. Naipaul expects Margarita to pay for them. He'd even like Margarita to help him with his living expenses in England. To please Naipaul, Margarita goes as far as prostituting herself to a rich Argentine who takes her to Spain in exchange for sex, if she can have a few days in England with Naipaul. Naipaul beats her savagely for this. But she likes it. Naipaul's wife, Pat, gets liver cancer after being addicted to quaaludes and valium for years. She needs it to sleep after her husband's mistreatment. Naipaul meets a young Pakistani woman while his wife is in the hospital dying and becomes engaged to her while his wife is still alive. When his wife dies he holds the funeral at 9 in the morning and picks up his new wife from the airport in the afternoon of the same day. As far as the mistress, Naipaul explains that he "...stayed with Margarita until she was middle aged. An old lady really." And did I mention that while juggling these three women there are prostitutes?
In addition to being a cad, Naipaul uses his male friends. He befriends Paul Theroux and gets Theroux to write great things about him. Young Theroux seems him as some kind of God and mentor. Naipaul mocks him behind his back and is just using him...as well as about everyone else in his life.
This is a good biography, but it has it's flaws. First, this isn't great stuff to read about. These human beings are miserable and Naipual is sublimely horrible. One major problem with this book is that Naipaul may not be worthy of having a biography written about him. Hitler has lots of biographies written about him too, but he killed six million people. Naipual's just written some books. I'm not sure it's worth anazlyzing such abhorrent behaviour for a writer that will probably be forgotten in twenty years.
Second, there were a lot of holes in French's narrative due to poor editing. In one of the chapters about Margarita for example, there was a bit about her "continuing" to try to get a separation from her husband. But that mention was the first mention of her husband and separation. French obviously cut out some earlier mention of Margarita's attempt to separate, but forgot to edit the second mention of the separation that did not assume the mention of the first. The whole book was full of broken story lines and structure-disjointed and unprofessionally edited, though the first half was better with this than the second half.
French had access to all of Naipaul's papers and there is a lot honesty in this biography, but I'll agree with other reviewers here that found the presentation "cold" and lacking analysis for the reader. This book can just seem like a long boring list of facts.
Naipaul wanted to be totally up front about his life because he thinks it's important in analyzing his artistic work. Supposedly, Naipaul made no changes to French's biography. But after reading The World Is What It Is, I believe that Naipaul just doesn't care what people think about him, so didn't care what was published. Naipaul is a biggot, misogynist, cheap skate, narcissist and maybe even a charlatain-and doesn't care if you-low life reader, know the truth about him. Naipaul respects no one. The world and Naipaul, are what they are. The world takes no responsibility for itself, and neither does Naipaul.
Naipaul is, by his own confession, a wretched human being. How wretched? In his early life he works hard and subjegates everything and everyone around him to his craft. But in mid-life something starts to happen and he sputters. He reawakens his creative impulse by having a 24 year long affair with a woman, Margarita, whom he beats during sex, rapes, throws shoes at, ignores and mistreats. His wife knows about this affair because Naipaul tells her. But he tells her because the affair is making him miserable and he wants his wife's sympathy. Margarita aborts at least three of Naipaul's children, leaves her husband and children-all on promises Naipaul makes to her and never keeps. Because she lives in Buenos Aires and Naipaul lives in England, Naipaul and Margarita's sexual get-togethers are difficult and expensive. Naipaul expects Margarita to pay for them. He'd even like Margarita to help him with his living expenses in England. To please Naipaul, Margarita goes as far as prostituting herself to a rich Argentine who takes her to Spain in exchange for sex, if she can have a few days in England with Naipaul. Naipaul beats her savagely for this. But she likes it. Naipaul's wife, Pat, gets liver cancer after being addicted to quaaludes and valium for years. She needs it to sleep after her husband's mistreatment. Naipaul meets a young Pakistani woman while his wife is in the hospital dying and becomes engaged to her while his wife is still alive. When his wife dies he holds the funeral at 9 in the morning and picks up his new wife from the airport in the afternoon of the same day. As far as the mistress, Naipaul explains that he "...stayed with Margarita until she was middle aged. An old lady really." And did I mention that while juggling these three women there are prostitutes?
In addition to being a cad, Naipaul uses his male friends. He befriends Paul Theroux and gets Theroux to write great things about him. Young Theroux seems him as some kind of God and mentor. Naipaul mocks him behind his back and is just using him...as well as about everyone else in his life.
This is a good biography, but it has it's flaws. First, this isn't great stuff to read about. These human beings are miserable and Naipual is sublimely horrible. One major problem with this book is that Naipaul may not be worthy of having a biography written about him. Hitler has lots of biographies written about him too, but he killed six million people. Naipual's just written some books. I'm not sure it's worth anazlyzing such abhorrent behaviour for a writer that will probably be forgotten in twenty years.
Second, there were a lot of holes in French's narrative due to poor editing. In one of the chapters about Margarita for example, there was a bit about her "continuing" to try to get a separation from her husband. But that mention was the first mention of her husband and separation. French obviously cut out some earlier mention of Margarita's attempt to separate, but forgot to edit the second mention of the separation that did not assume the mention of the first. The whole book was full of broken story lines and structure-disjointed and unprofessionally edited, though the first half was better with this than the second half.
French had access to all of Naipaul's papers and there is a lot honesty in this biography, but I'll agree with other reviewers here that found the presentation "cold" and lacking analysis for the reader. This book can just seem like a long boring list of facts.
Naipaul wanted to be totally up front about his life because he thinks it's important in analyzing his artistic work. Supposedly, Naipaul made no changes to French's biography. But after reading The World Is What It Is, I believe that Naipaul just doesn't care what people think about him, so didn't care what was published. Naipaul is a biggot, misogynist, cheap skate, narcissist and maybe even a charlatain-and doesn't care if you-low life reader, know the truth about him. Naipaul respects no one. The world and Naipaul, are what they are. The world takes no responsibility for itself, and neither does Naipaul.
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Top reviews from other countries
Tilak
4.0 out of 5 stars
Naipaul's biography
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 5, 2010
Excellent biography and French has grasped the brutality of life for a non white person in white British society of the 1950s and beyond (and now too!). But, alas, the great writer, wanted to belong and managed to do so in the end. Best review of book by A. N. Wilson, others focused with instinctive political correctness on the treatment of his angelic wife and mistress. The story French tells is more complicated and Naipaul gives ample indication of suffering autism and possessing the prodigious talent many of them seem to have.
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wanda hardman
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely enthralling
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 22, 2020
V.S. Naipaul is one of my favourite authors and I was eager to read his biography. It was revelation (not always in a good way) but, like his books, it tells the truth however uncomfortable it leaves the reader.
Aff
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling reads
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 5, 2016
Couldn't put it down. Can't wait to read everything VS Naipaul has written.
J. G. Brandon
5.0 out of 5 stars
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 14, 2015
Just what I wanted
AIJ.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 10, 2015
Worth it.
