The World is What it Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French

Jan 27, 2009

Kenneth rated it

V. S. Naipaul is hardly a household name (among the many Nobel Laureates in Literature who are not) but there is a case to be made that he's one of the better living writers in English. I've certainly learned a great deal about writing from having read nearly all of his books. From this biography, however, I've learned that Naipaul was every bit as much a racist, elitist, arguably misogynist semi-human as Paul Theroux suggested in his /Sir Vidia's Shadow/. And any sensitive reader is liable t...more

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Jan 26, 2009

Cnap rated it

This confirmed what I suspected from reading Naipaul all these years and that is that he is an extremely insecure and nervous person who is brilliant at critically picking everything apart. He is able to spot flaws and would be characterized as the teacher who groans with pleasure when finding a mistake on a paper, then feels deep but temporary satisfaction when the red pen makes a big check mark.

I feel sympathy for him, also. He is a skinny little black man who made his way in a big...more

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Jan 25, 2009

Lyn Maccorkle rated it

Patrick French had full cooperation from Naipaul in writing this warts and all biography. Naipaul is a great writer and a famously difficult person ... that he would so liberally expose himself , his correspondence, as well as the diaries of his first wife underscores his unsentimental respect for evidence (for me the foundation of his non-fiction works). The Naipaul family, early education, Trinidadian and Indian (Hindu) antecedents make an engaging story ... the outcome (including a Nobel Pr...more

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Jan 06, 2009

Warren marked it as to-read

Shelves: book-list-2009

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...more

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Dec 19, 2008

Tony rated it

Shelves: biography

French, Patrick. THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS. The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul. (2008). ***. About 200 pages into this 500-page biography of Naipaul, I decided that I was no longer interested in knowing any more about him. Although deftly written by French, using all of the available sources, you think of the old saying: “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” I have only read – I think – three of Naipaul’s books, all of which were excellent. When it comes to the man hims...more

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Jun 15, 2010

Joe rated it

The title of this biography, taken from the opening sentence of the subject's novel "A Bend in the River," goes far to capture the take me as I am character of V.S. Naipaul, perhaps the biggest douchebag to ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The man who treated everyone around him as his underlings, abused the woman with whom he was cheating on his wife, is a hard man to love, let alone like. You must after a while respect him. His work ethic, his ceaseless devotion to t...more

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Aug 22, 2009

Lawrence rated it

Upon finishing this book, these are the words I whispered to myself: "What a fucking bastard."

Here's how good Patrick French is: I knew exactly, exactly what was going to happen in the last twenty pages, because French had defined Naipaul's character so indelibly by that point. Yet those twenty pages still managed to draw tears.

French has assembled an amazing book: meticulous reporting, gripping writing, and one of the most fascinating writers' lives I've ever ...more

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Aug 10, 2009

John rated it

It must be difficult to write the biography of a writer of V. S. Naipaul's caliber. No living writer in the English language surpasses him in sheer talent, and I am hard-pressed to think of an equal. A reader familiar with Naipaul's flawless prose and witheringly cruel personal observations will inevitably expect similar talent from the writer's biographer. And if Patrick French does not here deliver the impossible, he at least comes close.

The purely literary difficulties are compou...moreIt must be difficult to write the biography of a writer of V. S. Naipaul's caliber. No living writer in the English language surpasses him in sheer talent, and I am hard-pressed to think of an equal. A reader familiar with Naipaul's flawless prose and witheringly cruel personal observations will inevitably expect similar talent from the writer's biographer. And if Patrick French does not here deliver the impossible, he at least comes close.

The purely literary difficulties are compounded by the distasteful nature of the subject. No one without an iron stomach could so completely immerse himself in the life of the most personally loathsome literary figure alive today. I read several reviews of this book before reading it myself, and all of them have marveled at the level of access that Naipaul granted French. In the end he made no demands for changes, either.

As far as I can tell, this has been uniformly misinterpreted by the reviewers as courage on the part of Naipaul, or at least a disdain for what people think of him. What the reviewers don't understand -- and what should be obvious after nearly 500 pages -- is that Naipaul revels in his own infamy, and for the past several decades at least has cultivated it in a way that can only be judged deliberate. French is charitable in saying that "his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility." This is a charming -- almost Naipaulian -- turn of phrase, but it is only half-true, and by that I mean to say that everything V. S. Naipaul does is an act of narcissism alone, because he does not have a molecule of humility in his body.

Indeed, reading this book is confirmation of why Naipaul's racism and colonial apologetics cannot be ascribed to "self-hatred." V.S. Naipaul may be afflicted with many things, but insufficient self-regard is not one of them. If he wanted to "escape" from Trinidad it is only because he regarded himself as so much better than everyone else there. Repeatedly, after lengthy and detail-rich discussions of the pain he caused other people -- more often than not those closest to him -- Naipaul's statements to French are full of self-pity, with pro forma concern for others tacked on in such a way that it is hard to escape the conclusion that Naipaul might be an outright sociopath.

The book has several faults:

(1) Indulgence of its subject's cranky politics, including his pretensions to "honesty." Edward Said was correct in saying of Naipaul's work that "what is seen as crucially informative and telling . . . - [e.g.,:] accounts of the Indian darkness or the Arab predicament - is precisely what is weakest about it: with reference to the actualities it is ignorant, illiterate, and cliché-ridden." Throughout the book French presents Naipaul as the foe of orthodoxy, and even slags off "political correctness," even though his ideas about Third World backwardness are the real, prevailing orthodoxy on the middlebrow opinion pages and in the State Departments and Foreign Services of the world's richest countries.

(2) Overattention to Naipaul's distasteful sex life. It is impossible to write a good biography without discussing his tortured first marriage to Patricia Hale; his long affair with Margaret Gooding; his unceremonious dumping of Gooding in favor of his current wife Nadira shortly after Patricia died (Margaret found out about the wedding from the papers); and even his frequent visits to prostitutes early in his marriage to Patricia (a fact he revealed only late in life, to the newspapers, while Patricia was dying of cancer -- another classic Naipaulian touch, that). The problem is that French gives a pass to -- or at least over-tolerates -- his subject's awful politics and petty bigotry, but makes up for it by documenting this aspect of his personal life in gruesome detail. And indeed no sane person could fail to be appalled, though we could all be spared the fact that, for example, V.S. Naipaul's airhead mistress -- at his instigation -- had taken to referring to the penis of the future Nobel laureate as a Hindu "god" and wrote that she wanted to worship at the temple. (And indeed, by the time you are finished reading this sentence you will know that she also once sent him "a 1:1 scale drawing of his erect penis, done in dark-brown felt-tip; the penis wore sunglasses and a lime-green cowboy hat." Patrick French is responsible for the fact that this image will never leave my head, and now I am responsible for the fact that it will never leave yours.)

But all of this is mixed in with rich discussion of the family life that birthed "A House for Mr. Biswas" and other treasures; a pathetic yet ultimately moving portrayal of Patricia Hale; well-done portraits of the others in Naipaul's life (Paul Theroux, author of the vengeful "Sir Vidia's Shadow," comes off more as a starstruck groupie than an actual friend of any kind); and an occasionally harrowing account of the creative process, particularly in the cases of "Guerrillas" and "A Bend In the River."

All told, if you're going to read a recent biography, this is the one.(less)

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Feb 05, 2009

Bookmarks Magazine rated it

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

...more

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Apr 11, 2010

Sam Schulman rated it

I've written a piece on French's book together with Michael Slater's Dickens and Andrew Motion's Philiip Larkin at Templeton's InCharacter.org called
Goodish Writers, Bad-ish Men.

We have many goodish writers in this country, but few great ones, and V.S. Naipaul is a great writer." - A.N. Wilson

Everyone knows one thing about the life of Charles Dickens: the trauma of his childhood stung him into bestsellerdom. The 12-year-old boy whose parents were imprisoned...more

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Feb 08, 2009

Sesh rated it

I don't generally read biographies, but this one I could not pass on. I am not a fan of V.S. Naipaul's writing. I could only manage to finish one book of his, "A House for Mr. Biswas". But when I read Paul Theroux's account of is friendship with Naipaul ("Sir Vidia's Shadow") I was intrigued. Naipaul was portrayed as selfish, brilliant, obstinate, proud, unfeeling, shocking, and more. How could you not want to know more about him? French charts Naipaul's personal life through...more

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May 14, 2009

Tasha rated it

Recommends it for: readers of Naipaul's work

Shelves: 2009

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Apr 07, 2011

Raghu rated it

· review of another edition

This book is a brilliant tribute to one of the greatest writers in English of the past few decades. The narrative pace is good and it is gripping to read. When I finished the book, I thought it is a 'four star' book; but then on reflection, I felt that it was lacking in a few qualities and hence I ended up with one star less.
Vidia Naipaul emerges as a very complicated persona - narcissistic, intellectually brilliant, insensitive, original thinker, selfish and honest. In his own words, Naip...moreThis book is a brilliant tribute to one of the greatest writers in English of the past few decades. The narrative pace is good and it is gripping to read. When I finished the book, I thought it is a 'four star' book; but then on reflection, I felt that it was lacking in a few qualities and hence I ended up with one star less.
Vidia Naipaul emerges as a very complicated persona - narcissistic, intellectually brilliant, insensitive, original thinker, selfish and honest. In his own words, Naipaul writes to his wife, "..I am the spectator, free of the emancipatory fire, who has no wish to reform the human race..".
On the positive side, his fearless thinking and extraordinary abilities to write are well documented. His insight into the societies of the West Indies, Argentina, Africa and some of the Islamic nations in Asia is legendary and is shown through his non-fictional work. Contrary to the image created in the media, he was close to his father, brother, sisters and nephews and nieces. Like Indians from India, he felt the great responsibility and duty to support his sisters and mother through their lives, even though he didn't do it as well as his sisters did. But he was really close only to his sister Kamla. One can see his human side in his grief on the death of his sister Sati and brother Shiva.
On the other side, he was exploitative and cruel towards the women in his life - both his wife Pat and Margaret, his lover of two decades. He was depressed often and even attempted a suicide in his twenties. Prostitutes fascinated him and he continued visiting them even after his marriage. During his marriage, he carried on a twenty-year affair with Margaret with the full knowledge of his wife. He was highly class-conscious and had racial dislike for Blacks and Muslims. He was often rude, intolerant and parsimonious to the point of exploiting others. To cap it all, he starts an affair with a Pakistani woman even as his wife Pat was at death's door due to cancer.
Patrick French has produced an excellent book and he has done as good a job as one can in writing a biography of a living legend like Naipaul. But he has not thrown enough light on why a competent, ambitious and accomplished woman like Pat would be so servile towards Naipaul all her life. It looks as though Naipaul simply destroyed the self-esteem of any woman he lived with by his sheer brilliance. His lover Margaret also was abused physically and mentally but she still was crazy about him. She also comes off as someone whose self-esteem was in shambles during their relationship. French has not given much insight into the psychology behind these events. He hasn't blamed Naipaul's racism on his upper-caste Hindu origins like most people have done. But neither has he given much psychological insight into Naipaul's intense dislike for calling himself a 'West Indian'. Naipaul considered England his home and later on in life, made peace with India, the land of his ancestors. Also, it is not clear as to how Naipaul has been able to charm Margaret for twenty years through an intensely sexual relationship, even though Naipaul himself admits that he was poorly equipped at seduction and sex. It seems that it was his intellectual brilliance that made Pat, Margaret and even Nadira, his current wife, crazy about being with him.
The book contains many of Naipaul's remarks in passing. On the position of Indians in Trinidad, the author quotes Naipaul's father as : .."The difficulty lies in the fact that they are are too much of a majority to assimilate, too much of a minority to dominate..". This applies possibly today to many islamic minority groups in Europe.
On Trinidad, Naipaul makes this punishing comments: "..like monkeys pleading for evolution, each claiming to be whiter than the other, Indians and Negroes appeal to the unacknowledged white audience to see how much they despise each other.."
On Islam, he says, "..it is innately imperialist, requiring its followers to diminish their native culture.....each country has a quarrel with the modern world;and my own feeling is that Islam, in these countries, is as much looking away as looking back. Is it despair, a recognition of intellectual and scientific incapacity? Is it nihilism? Doesn't this kind of anti-intellectual movement...commit these countries to a continuing dependence on the technology and science of the West? Independence then, leads back to dependence.."
This book is a must read for all V.S. Naipaul fans. Those who haven't read Naipaul at all, perhaps should not read this to get an idea of the man.
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Feb 07, 2012

Robert Boyd rated it

Shelves: intellectual-history, literature

This is an authorized biography, but it hardly seems like a whitewash. When I first heard about it, it sounded as if Naipaul were attempting to counteract the negative press he got due to Paul Theroux's In Sir Vidia's Shadow. But the Naipaul in this book is just as bad--worse even--than the one in Theroux's book.

Indeed, Naipaul comes of a little like Celine; a great writer and a terrible person.

As I read it, it made me want to go back a reread some of my favorite Naipaul book...more

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Jun 03, 2010

Valentina rated it

How can such a talented writer, insightful on all things human, canny observer of the world, restless traveler, also be such a self-centered, self-righteous, self-indulging man with little respect for anything or anyone? If you've been searching for the ultimate book on evil meet genius, look no further...This biography of Nobel Prize winning, Trinidad-born, English author of Indian descent V.S. Naipaul is an absolute masterpiece, for how it traces its subject life story, paralleling it with tha...more

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Apr 27, 2009

Pat rated it

This book was well-written and it shows Sir Vidia with all of his warts, of which there are very many. However, Naipaul is just such an odious character that I couldn't stay interested in his life. He treated his first wife just abysmally. He carried on an affair for 23 years of his marriage and, as soon as his first wife died, he dropped the mistress and married another woman many years younger than him. While there are some of his books that I have liked, especially some of the early ones,...more

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Jun 16, 2010

Darryl rated it

· review of another edition

Vidiadhar Surajprasad (V.S.) Naipaul (1932-), the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, is one of the most highly regarded authors of the 20th century. He was born in Trinidad, and his ancestors were part of the Indian migration to this Caribbean island in the 19th century. He was awarded a scholarship to Oxford in 1950, where he met his wife, the former Patricia Hale. After his graduation he dedicated his life to becoming a writer, and was financially supported by Pat during his early ...more

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Nov 21, 2011

Mark rated it

The book is excellently written, compelling and shocking in equal measure and a painful reminder of the trauma inflicted on a child of the post colonial racial confusion and colour/class consciousness still painfully evident in Trinidadian society. It achieves this through the recounting of the legendary, pathetic, tragic - albeit prolific - life of VS Naipaul. The book left me with my dilemma over Naipaul fully intact. French quotes Linton Kwesi Johnson on Naipaul 'He's a living example of ho...moreThe book is excellently written, compelling and shocking in equal measure and a painful reminder of the trauma inflicted on a child of the post colonial racial confusion and colour/class consciousness still painfully evident in Trinidadian society. It achieves this through the recounting of the legendary, pathetic, tragic - albeit prolific - life of VS Naipaul. The book left me with my dilemma over Naipaul fully intact. French quotes Linton Kwesi Johnson on Naipaul 'He's a living example of how art transcends the artist 'cos he talks a load of shit but still writes excellent books. A sentiment with which I entirely agree. VS Naipaul remains a controversial figure because of the contradiction of his snobbery, arrogance and racism with the precision, incisiveness and eloquence of his prose. The book confirmed my contempt for what Nigerian critic Okwui Enwezor describes as Naipaul's 'noxious writings' and further confirmed Edward Said's observation (recently quoted in Joseph O'Neil's article in The Atlantic Sept 2011) in which he pertinently pointed out that ' Naipaul’s account of the Islamic, Latin American, African, Indian and Caribbean worlds totally ignores a massive infusion of critical scholarship about those regions in favor of the tritest, cheapest and the easiest of colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies, myths that even Lord Cromer and Forster’s Turtons and Burtons would have been embarrassed to trade in outside their private clubs.' Naipaul is indeed a both highly gifted and truly odious character who seems to suffer from a virulent strain of compulsive obsessive disorder which he tacitly passes off as evidence of his purported Brahminic heritage. Does it matter that he is so wicked if his books are good.....? Maybe not ... but this is a good read to understand the background of a disturbed post colonial paradox....glad my wife daughter and I walked out of his lecture at UWI in Trinidad a few years ago he really is disgusting and the book reveals why

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Apr 11, 2010

Andrew rated it

Shelves: nyt-top-100-books-2008

A lot has been made of how frank this biography is. It’s certainly true that V.S. Naipaul gave his biographer Patrick French access to a huge amount of material, including things that other people would have tried to keep quiet about. For example the racism, the bigotry, the use of prostitutes, the affairs, the betrayals, the occasional violence, the perpetual cruelty. Yes, this is a very frank biography.

But what impressed me most about the book is how French succeeded in making Naip...moreA lot has been made of how frank this biography is. It’s certainly true that V.S. Naipaul gave his biographer Patrick French access to a huge amount of material, including things that other people would have tried to keep quiet about. For example the racism, the bigotry, the use of prostitutes, the affairs, the betrayals, the occasional violence, the perpetual cruelty. Yes, this is a very frank biography.

But what impressed me most about the book is how French succeeded in making Naipaul into a consistent, understandable character. It doesn’t mean that I like him or approve of the things he did, but it means that I understand how he came to be the way he was. French’s depiction of Naipaul’s life is so complete that I feel as if I know the man now.

Naipaul’s main motivation is established early on in the book. His family life is chaotic, with his whole extended family sharing one large house and constant bickering between the various uncles and aunts. He feels he has to get out of Trinidad, and to do so he devotes all his energy to winning a rare scholarship to study at Oxford. He wins it, moves to England and meets with racism, which intensifies his obsession with working, harder and harder, to show people he’s the best, he’s V.S. Naipaul the writer, not just the wog that they see.

The pattern continues throughout the rest of the book, as Naipaul puts his writing above everything else. He betrays his wife, his family, his friends, the people who help him — he will sacrifice anything to become a great writer. The result is tremendous success, but also extreme loneliness. It’s amazing how, throughout the whole book, there are almost no genuine friendships. Naipaul seems to have lots of connections and acquaintances, but no real friends. He works the literary circles of London, befriending aristocrats and using their spare country houses to get the isolation he needs to work on his books, but when he needs to confide in someone he has no options.

One of the most astonishing passages in the book was when Naipaul was having problems with his long-term mistress, Margaret, and the person he went to for support and advice was his wife Pat! She was the only person he could confide in, and the other astonishing thing was that she let him do it. She knew about Margaret for something like 20 years, and yet she let him run off to Argentina to be with her for a few months, and then come back to her when he needed her again. As with Naipaul himself, Pat’s life became a pattern. Early on, soon after they met at Oxford, Naipaul had a nervous breakdown and it was Pat who supported him and saved him. From that point on, Naipaul controlled her completely, not by force but by using his own frailty as an excuse. He stopped her from pursuing her dream of acting because of his own insecurities, and she let him do it. It’s a fascinating and quite disturbing relationship. Naipaul is both dominant and helpless, using his apparent helplessness to lock Pat into a manipulative relationship. At one point he leaves her, but then returns a few months later saying he needs her help, and yet again she lets him come back. She seems to be willing to do anything to support him and especially, as he has more and more success, his writing. In the diary extracts that French quotes, there’s often a sense that she knows her life is being ruined, but that she has come to share her husband’s view that his writing is so important that everything else must be sacrificed to support what she calls his “Genius”.

There are plenty of examples in this book of pronouncements from V.S. Naipaul that hardly seem worthy of the label “genius”. For instance, writing to his editor Diana Athill, “Lunacy and servility: they remain the ingredients of the Negro character. I wonder why this isn’t written about, why the Negro writers continue to be so sentimental about themselves.” Or talking about the effect of his affair with Margaret on his wife Pat: “I was liberated. She was destroyed. It was inevitable.”

The racism French tries to explain as provocation: Naipaul liking to take extreme positions to provoke a reaction. Some of this is plausible – for example in public appearances or at dinner parties he might want to take on this persona, deliberately aggravating people purely for effect. But there’s no reason to do that in private letters, so I think there’s something more going on. I think it’s bound up with the reason he left Trinidad, the hatred he had learned to feel for the island and, by extension, the majority black population. His family made it clear to him that he should associate with Indians only – one of his cousins recalls the grandmother saying “You can’t associate with niggers.” When Naipaul went to England later, he was anxious to distinguish himself from other Caribbean writers like Sam Selvon and George Lamming. And when Pat tried to help him get a job by appealing to someone in government who helped West Indian immigrants, he said he “would not involve himself with Mr Davies, a latter-day protector of immigrants, nor would he be classified alongside people who climbed off banana boats wearing zoot-suits and wanted jobs in factories. He was V.S. Naipaul, the writer.”

The emotional incapacity is astonishing, too. When Margaret gets pregnant, Naipaul just stops answering her letters. She writes to him in distress, asking for his support, and he does nothing. This happens a couple of times. Later, when Pat is dying of cancer, he is faced with the prospect of being with Margaret finally, and dumps her. He then proposes to Nadira, a woman he met in Pakistan. The day after Pat is cremated, Nadira moves into the house Pat and Naipaul had shared for decades. In his day-to-day life, it’s Pat who has to deal with anything unpleasant, while Naipaul just hides, abdicating responsibility.

It’s interesting, and a little depressing, that Naipaul did not make much money as a writer for a very long time. Even in the 1970s, when he was already a big name and had won the Booker Prize and was writing columns and appearing on TV, he was still only making £7,600 a year, and for many years Pat was supporting him with her teaching work. In the 1980s, partly due to a new agent, his average income jumped to £143,600, and then of course winning the Nobel Prize made him a very rich man. But for a long, long time, even when he was famous, he wasn’t making that much money.

I was surprised that the book ended slightly abruptly, just after Pat’s death in 1996. This also coincides with his marriage to Nadira, so made me wonder if the biography was, in this respect, not completely frank. Perhaps either Naipaul or Nadira refused access to this latest chapter. Or maybe there will be another volume covering his later years – the last word in the book is “Enough”, with a footnote saying “For the moment.”(less)

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Apr 12, 2009

Stephanie rated it

This was and continued to be a bit of slow start -- first you seemingly learned about each sugar cane stalk in Trinidad, each newspaper article written by Naipaul, each letter written to each person in his life, and then finally every final detail about his long-suffering (physically and mentally) wife's death.

In the end what I learned is that Naipaul, one of my favorite writers (read A Bend in the River), is really a jerk. He's self-absorbed, masochistic (internally and at times, s...more

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Jan 03, 2009

Dan Oko rated it

An extraordinary account of the life of an extraordinary author. You won't like Naipaul anybody for having read French's insightful study of his life and work. If, as the Modern Lovers used to say, nobody ever called Pablo Picasso an asshole; the same cannot be said of Naipaul.

Check my Austin Chronicle review here: <a href="http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/review?oid=oid%3A713974>http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/review?oid=oid%3A713974</a>

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May 26, 2009

Patrick rated it

The beginning of the book, and even the first half or maybe three quarters is really interesting, but the last bit just sort of turns into a laundry list of all the things Naipaul has done that make him a horrible bastard. Whether this is wholly accurate, or simply how P. French chose to portray him (Naipaul requested no changes upon reading a manuscript, so it's doubtful that it's too misleading on Naipaul's character), it doesn't make for very enjoyable reading.

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Aug 08, 2011

Wilhelm Weber rated it

Shelves: biography-current-literature

Fascinating how this man becomes a novelist - its hard work on his part all the way up from school and through his college and university years and it seems he was always more driven, than in control. He never really seems to enjoy anything, needs to write and does this and that to experiment. Tragically insecure, unbalanced and without a hold on life, but still very much dominating other people. Especially those who love him. He does have a unique view on things and Patrick French paints a pict...more

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Jan 08, 2009

Anthony rated it

Can an utterly self-possessed ogre be a brilliant writer? Apparently so. The biography of the deracinated, famously bigoted, cruel, and Nobel Prize winning, Trinidad-born V.S. Naipaul. Really well written biography that reads like a fast-paced novel in some places. Or maybe that was just Naipaul's life.

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Jan 14, 2009

Jane rated it

So far, an exhaustive but fascinating analysis of Naupaul's birth and life in Trinidad; his family, and its influence on him and his books, and his first days at Oxford. You begin to see how a great, but flawed, author is created.

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Nov 01, 2010

National Book Critics Circle rated it

· review of another edition

See NBCC Board Member Eric Banks's review at Critical Mass, as part of 30 Books in 30 Days:
http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/2008...

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Mar 25, 2009

Eleanor rated it

This has got to be one of the most detailed autobiographies
I have ever read. His childhood days in Trinidad are chock
full of those details - His father was a great writing teacher!

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Oct 09, 2009

Katie rated it

Fans of Naipaul's work - or those interested in other writers grappling with post-colonial identities - will enjoy this biography. It is well-researched and in-depth, but also interesting and an enjoyable read. While I came away liking Naipul less than before, particularly with regards to his treatment towards his wife, I also came away with a greater appreciation of his work and his struggles in life. This book really made me think about what it takes to be a great artist - author, painter, or ...more

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Mar 20, 2011

Thamrong added it

This is an authorized biography of VSNaipaul. No hold bar and good exposures of the true self of this outstanding writer.

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Nov 23, 2008

Elisabeth marked it as to-read

I've loved everything I've read in the New Yorker etc. I'll have to pick this one up. Thanks for the comments!

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The World is What it Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul

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