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product details and reviews (5.83 seconds for ASIN 1400079802)
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Vintage)product pricing List Price: Price: $11.56 You Save: $5.44 (32%) ![]() Author: Patrick FrenchPublisher: VintageRelease Date: November 3, 2009Media: PaperbackRelated ProductsView some of the @count@ related items available from eBay. Related Items Available from eBayProduct DescriptionThe first major biography of V.S. Naipaul, the controversial and enigmatic Nobel laureate: a stunning writer whose only stated ambition was greatness, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred. Beginning in rich detail in Trinidad, where Naipaul was born into an Indian family, Patrick French skillfully examines Naipaul’s life within a displaced community and his fierce ambition at school. He describes how, on scholarship at Oxford, homesickness and depression struck with great force; the ways in which Naipaul’s first wife helped him to cope and their otherwise fraught marriage; and Naipaul’s struggles throughout subsequent uncertainties in England, including his twenty-five-year-long affair. Naipaul’s extraordinary gift—producing, uniquely, masterpieces of both fiction and nonfiction—is most of all born of a forceful, visionary impulse, whose roots French traces with a sympathetic brilliance and devastating insight. Average Rating: 4.0 Product ReviewsThis would have been better if shorter Since Mr French had access to all Naipaul's papers, he apparently felt the need to include them all, down to grocery lists and bills. This is a shame as this book would have been better and an easier read if he had edited more. I grew up in the Caribbean where Naipaul is alternately respected, particularly for his hilarious earlier work, and reviled for his dismissive attitude to the region (One of his books says something like "Nothing good ever came from the Caribbean."). I think he would approve of this reputation and probably even revel in the very negative portrayal he has received from someone he gave extensive interviews to as well as access to his papers. I kept reading the book in hopes that Pat, his first wife, (who he told the day after they married, "I should not have done this") would leave him. But no, she stayed to the bitter end, along with his mistress of 25 years, who he also overthrew for a completely different woman after Pat died. I can't imagine what any of these women saw in him. Maybe he is different in person. This biography has ensured I never buy another Naipaul book. NOT SO FAST Patrick French has worked hard to produce a definitive biography of V.S. Naipaul--the quintessential Westernised Oriental Gentleman--in clear, economical prose, but he does not often achieve the thoroughly detached, magisterial effect he seeks. Unable to completely suppress his astonishment at the famous author's impoverished family background in colonial Trinidad, he fails completely to capture the richness of Naipaul's crucial high school experience at the elite Queen's Royal College in Port-of-Spain, which endowed the bright little `coolie' boy with important advantages over the British students he would compete against at Oxford University. And in striving to be fair to the complexity of his subject's psychology, French offers only feeble objections to Naipaul's ferocious contempt for black West Indians and his one-sided view of the ongoing racial conflicts in the Caribbean. The book underplays Naipaul's family connections to the stridency and intrigue of Hindu party politics, and leaves the distinct impression that Trinidad's most famous academic and `Negro' politician, Dr. Eric Williams, was a vulgar opportunist and racial demagogue. This is nothing less than an execrable falsification of Trinidadian political history.
A fine and deeply upsetting biography about V.S. Naipaul Author Patrick French has created a tour de force portrait of a great writer whose worldly success and emotional vulnerabilities eventually combined to push him off the deep end as a human being. I read this book for a chance to revisit the fine work that I remember admiring so much when I started to read Naipaul in college in the late 1970s (at the suggestion of a friend and fellow Duke student from Mexico City). A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, The Return of Eva Peron--I still have all the dusty paperbacks, and eagerly pulled them open to compare the text with what was in the biography. It was extremely, even intensely interesting to see French reveal the nuts & bolts of Naipaul's writing techniques and find out how these perfectly crafted works were created. So that's where that line about the Argentinean death squads driving Ford Falcons came from! For that alone, French's book is one of the best portrayals of the writing process I have read.
Fear does amazing things A completely satisfying biography--the subject and the biographer combine to make a book that is relentlessly interesting. Unlike many biographies of famous and accomplished people, like Einstein, this one keeps its level of interest right through to the very sad end. Because VSN is so protean, talented and driven. Lots of things happen to him, he produces a lot of amazing books and has great insight. The book is written with a great deal of skill and somehow keeps its balance in all things. Lots of information, but not too much. Handles a very touchy and difficult, tricky and evasive person very well. VSN is a remarkable subject, from beginning to end. For Naipaul Fans This is a must read for Naipaul fans.
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