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US Mall 1 - The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
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List Price: $30.00
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Manufacturer: Knopf
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781400044054
ISBN: 1400044057
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 576
Publication Date: 2008-11-04
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: 2008-11-04
Studio: Knopf
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Scrupulously Thorough
Comment: I felt that this book took a while to get going, but once it did, it really grabbed you and held you. As a fan of Doctor Johnson, I always enjoyed Naipaul's rather robust table talk and merciless putdowns, plenty of which are served up here for our shocked and awed pleasure. I am reluctant to join the crowd of those who condemn him, as none of us, were all our mixed motives and our mean behaviour exposed as in this book, would be shown to be flawless. I'm keen to read more of Naipaul's works.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Emotional bully; outstanding writer
Comment: When V.S. Naipaul was given a copy of the completed manuscript of this biography he returned it to the author without comments or corrections; that surprising fact appears on page xi of this book; and by the time one reaches page 490, two hypothesis about why he would not change, or at least comment upon, a book that draws him in such repulsive terms remain standing: One, he never looked at the manuscript for fear of a disagreeable and emotional entanglement with it (a habit of avoidance he had carefully honed throughout his life) or, Two, his corrections would have been so massive that they would have forced an entire rewriting or rethinking of his biography, something that neither he, nor the author, would have found tolerable since truth would per force suffer deeply in any effort to redraw Naipaul as an acceptable human being. So he is here, warts and all, for all to see and sneer at.
Patrick French was given unlimited access to the entire and heretofore highly restricted Naipaul archives at the University of Tulsa; this included "his notebooks, correspondence, hand written manuscripts, financial papers, recordings, photographs, press cuttings and journals,(and those of his first wife Pat, which he had never read.)" The materials were massive and thus the book is hefty; unfortunately it is also dull. Quite possibly the sheer quantity of material led to the huge stretches of uninteresting prose which dominate the narrative.
The author remains aloof and non-judgmental about the tortures that Mr. Naipaul's narcissism inflicts on his many victims, thus depriving the story of the emotional vibrancy and color it deserves. Although the author does not condone Mr. Naipaul for his repulsive and cruel treatment of others, his detachment is at times irritating for its very coolness in the face of the dreadful situations that are being described. One thing is to shrugg off the sadomasochistic games he played with a consenting (more or less consenting) mistress, and quite another is to be neutral about the years of torture Naipaul inflicted upon a passive but adoring wife whom he eventually killed with his nonsense.
That such a profound character disorder would coexist with the capacity to write exquisite English prose remains a mystery, even though it should not: character and temperament are, perhaps astonishingly, quite independent from artistic genius, and examples abound: Picasso, Wagner and Beethoven quickly come to mind. This biography only indirectly and superficially presents the irony of a person combining a supreme mastery of writing with a miniscule sense of human compassion. Great writers are not necessarily great people.
One cannot help but draw a comparison with that other book devoted to Naipaul by his one time friend Paul Theroux: "Sir Vidia's Shadow" is flawed because if its many inaccuracies, and its motives (revenge, certainly); but never a dull momemt there. Theroux's comment upon reading the current biography was a rueful "It seems I did not know half of all the horrors." Indeed.
I would recommend this book only to the serious Naipaul scholar, for whom it is frankly an absolute necessity in terms of the historical facts it displays. I would not recommend it to the average reader or to the Naipaul fan looking for an understanding of the man.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Incomparable as a writer, a failure as a human being
Comment: While the contradiction between professional success and personal failure is hardly unusual in the world of art and literature, Naipaul's biography provides an extreme example of this incongruity - incomparable gifts as a writer and thinker and abject failure as a human being. As a fellow Caribbean national (though he strenuously rejects the significance of his origins to his work), I have long been fascinated by Naipaul's work and have read all of his books, with the exception of the glacial and impenetrable "Enigma of Arrival" still bookmarked on page 210. He has traveled a long way from the early Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street and his vision and preoccupations have expanded accordingly to encompass observations not only on post-colonial peoples but also on the human condition more broadly speaking. Along the way, he seems to have set scant store by friendship or indeed relationships. This lack of charity towards others he extended even to his longsuffering wife Pat who, when he was still in his early twenties and seeking (unsuccessfully) his way in the world, had saved him from the grim spiral of depression and nervous breakdown. French, who had full access to her diaries and to the author's private papers, provides fascinating insights into Naipaul's personal world, including the context that shaped his many novels and travel writings. Given this unprecedented access, "The World is What It Is" is likely to remain the definitive biography of the 76-year old Naipaul. I vividly remember the author's response a few years ago to the noted broadcast journalist Charlie Rose. When asked in a television interview if with the advancing years he had intimations of his own mortality, he replied that for him death would be a release. A visibly startled Charlie Rose had asked him to repeat what he had just said. This, despite all the fame and fortune he has earned and all the accolades won, including his knighthood and the Nobel Prize. Could it be that his lasting legacy will be not his superbly crafted novels and penetrating insights but his own life story as a cautionary tale?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Art Transcends Life
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Hate oppression, fear the oppressed": an uneasy subject's unflinching gaze
Comment: This authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul has provoked controversy for its prickly subject, who read the entire manuscript and altered nothing; it's also garnered praise for its author, who drew on the entire archive of what he notes may be the last major writer who's left an entirely paper trail, instead of disc drives. I've only read a bit of Naipaul: "Among the Believers" about his travels in the non-Arab Islamic realm, and "The Return of Eva Perón," essays on Michael X, Perón's Argentina, and Conrad. After finishing French's bold, compassionate, and fair-minded study of this formidable master of masks, I will seek out more. That's a recommendation for both the irascible author and his patient chronicler. This is not a flawless analysis, therefore not five-stars, but French's careful discussion often approaches perfection. I admired (and reviewed) French's "Tibet, Tibet," a brave book that took on an iconic figure and asked similarly tough questions honestly.
Often, reviews have commented on VSN's fearsome reputation more than French's nuanced interpretation. What's needed now: a flavor of French's prose. I will excerpt how he filters VSN. French introduces his aims as a biographer: "not to sit in judgement, but to expose the subject with ruthless clarity to the calm eye of the reader." (xv) The myth, as VSN himself mentions, rests in those who follow; the writer keeps only the control over his books.
His tiny birthplace, forty miles by forty, occupies an uneasy place for self- promoting, self- entitled VSN. Self- described as "a Trinidadian of Hindu descent," he's a British subject unable to find a homeland. Marginalized, he returns to the center of the disbanded empire to seek his rightful place. The colonial society that raised him, divided by castes and religions, ethnicities and politics, could not sustain his energy. To escape, he had to assume the master's mask. Yet, Oxford "was a traditional, English, clubbable, unreal way for a young man from the Caribbean to be living, and it left him feeling lonely and unfulfilled." (91-92)
French evokes well the snobbery of the Isis student magazine for which VSN worked; the insularity of the university clashed with his hopes of a literary career that he desperately pursued while nearly starving in post- WWII, discriminatory, and hardbitten society in London. He and his student- teacher wife, virgins when they met, lived on very little. They moved from friend to flat and back. They were not suited for each other, totally, but at his young age, VSN stayed with the first shy woman who befriended him. He told her, at their age of twenty, how he resisted reforming, rebelling, or resisting. Instead, he insisted to her on being accepted.
He enters Britain at its capital core, pioneering the post- colonial counter- diasporic critique. "Legally prevented" after graduation "from migrating inside the new Commonwealth," VSN in the early 1950s sought a career in a nation with few East or West Indians. This "double exile" as "a deracinated colonial" as the Empire contracted left VSN anxious, yet determined not to retreat. With little steady work, landlords hostile at best to his presence, and widespread prejudice, he complained to his wife, Pat: "That is what the whole policy of the Free World amounts to. Naipaul, poor wog, literally starving, and very cold." (135, 137) The self- pity mingles with a level- headed appraisal of the situation for this internal exile.
"I am the spectator, the flaneur par excellence. I am free of the emancipatory fire." (qtd. 101) French deftly measures Trinidad's racial divide between Indians and blacks, He traces how Eric Williams rose to unsettling populist power there. Later, West Indian intellectual C.L.R. James early on challenged VSN for exposing the depredations of their Caribbean homelands without relativism, without the imperial context of the white man's impact. VSN rebelled against any "betraying his essence" by averting one's eye.
VSN refused to back down; as one character puts it: "Hate oppression; fear the oppressor." The emancipated dark subaltern, VSN warned (in my phrase), could be as dangerous as the retreating British sergeant. He later mused how totalitarianism often disguised itself under an "illusion of serving virtue"; writers seeking truth cannot collude with this pretense. (qtd. 469) This confident stance did not endear him to his Black Power peers, nor did it assuage the troubled consciences of many American, European, or Third World liberals.
VSN refused to back down; as one character puts it: "Hate oppression; fear the oppressor." The emancipated dark subaltern, VSN warned (in my phrase), could be as dangerous as the retreating British sergeant. This stance did not endear him to his Black Power peers, nor did it assuage the troubled consciences of many American, European, or Indian liberals.
It's sobering to find, well into his success, that VSN labored nearly destitute. He travelled to India, Africa, Trinidad, Europe frequently, but often relied on expense accounts, wealthier friends, or an absent friend of a friend's flat for accommodation. This led, however, to estrangement sexually and psychologically from loyal but bewildered Pat as his fame spread. The self- pity that he expressed to Pat early on deepened. Depression drove him to prostitutes. Shame grew; so did his capacity to transcribe follies of his fellows. He cultivated his imperious aura.
All along, as to his one-time protegee Paul Theroux, VSN rehearsed a familiar refrain. "Think of it like this: imagine the despair to which the barefoot colonial is reduced when, wanting to write, and reading the pattern books of Tolstoy, Balzac et al, he looks at his own world and discovers that it almost doesn't exist." (qtd. 269) True, but as French delicately counters, this "shrewd piece of self- presentation" repackages scholarship winning, Oxford- educated, critically lauded VSN as irredeemably "unprecedented, underprivileged, alienated." His pride and his determination segregated him from his Third World brethren, whether writers or workers. This pride kept VSN a difficult person to please despite plaudits brought by his fiction and commissions enabling his TV, radio, and print journalism.
"Ambitious, protean, made of smart material, deracinated by the accelerated politics of the end of empire, Vidia made a conscious choice to refashion himself." (209) India attracted him; the West Indies perplexed him. Out of this inability to fit in, overqualified and often overwhelmed by his intelligence and his Oxford education, where he lamented the absence of aristocrats vs. the state- scholarship students like himself and Pat, VSN's drive to succeed at the master's game made him a frank, yet brusque, critic of nearly everyone around him, no matter where he found himself writing, probing, and goading. This quality, as French tells us right away, comes from a Trinidadian "picong" attitude: "where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener sent reeling." (xi) Many fell for Sir Vidua's conversational bait over six decades. "As an accidental, occidental Indian from 'the most amusing island that ever dotted a sea,' Vidia felt included and excluded," and not only in India. (223)
He did his own including and excluding. "Vidia had a view of the world that he would do anything to maintain, just as he would sacrifice anything or anybody that stood in the way of his central purpose, to be 'the writer.'" (359) French judges that VSN could not countenance Pat as his equal. She, congenitally doomed it seems to play the "great man's wife," was cast aside by VSN as he pursued, on and off interspersed with Pat for many years, the Anglo-Argentinian Margaret Gooding. One of VSN's friends reported that his apparently captivating mistress appeared to have but fifty words in her spoken vocabulary; she does not come across, at least in English, as striking anyone of French's informants as scintillating or smart.
Documenting Naipaul's infidelity and his power over wife and lover, French through extraordinary tact paraphrases VSN's correspondence with both women. Reviewers have been aroused by the hints that French only alludes to (Margaret's literal "phallic worship" seems about it, that and his physical brutality towards her as emotionally against Pat) of sexually charged tension exploited by VSN. He's a ladies' man, despite his boorishness.
Pat reverenced her husband. I found his biographer's considerable discretion equally intriguing. As with the intelligent, isolated Pat's lonely diary and notes to her husband, these indirectly phrased letters to Margaret (who left her husband and her three children behind to be the on- off trophy VSN paraded globally) support VSN's own egotism. He moved between the two paramours; other times he lived alone. As he reduces it, he ruined Pat: "I was liberated. She was destroyed. It was inevitable." (qtd. 313)
His income under a new publisher (and endless lectures, conference invitations, and commissions for articles?) increased sevenfold after "A Bend in the River." By the '80s, he represented the frustrations of "corrected leftists," those who turned to VSN to argue why the Third World remained mired in post- colonial corruption. His judgments in "Among the Believers" appear prescient after 9/11, but when they appeared, he was derided as an Orientalist or apologist. Derek Wolcott, Edward Said, and activists who opposed his disillusion found themselves his targets. They fought back. VSN accepted Hanif Kureishi; he did not support Rushdie against the fatwa, "an extreme form of literary criticism." (qtd. 434) The title of this biography comes from the first sentence of "Bend." "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." (qtd. 386) VSN determined to be "the" writer of the harsh, globalizing, mediated, diasporic decade.
By the end of it, he earned a knighthood. He took the tube to the ceremony. VSN did not mellow, but he did express an admiration of what modernity allowed people such as himself: the pursuit of happiness that traditional mores and creeds did not allow many adherents. His own pursuits, typically, dominated his mature years. Pat died of cancer; French describes movingly their final weeks together. The day after her cremation, Nadira (a younger Pakistani Muslim journalist he had met while working on "Beyond Belief," a sequel to his earlier visits among the non-Arab Islamic world) moved in to VSN's house. Margaret learned of her ex-lover's marriage, two months later, in the newspaper; Pat had found out about-- in similarly roundabout fashion-- her husband's dalliances with prostitutes decades earlier only in a 1994 interview with The New Yorker.
After Pat's death, VSN found few with whom to mourn, perhaps understandably. His lifelong expectation of fealty, his shunning of friends, and his use or abuse of human sources may have helped him with his considerable gifts of extracting the essentials for his own journalism and travel narratives, but they did not win him many confidantes. French enlivens the discussion near the end, with a deeper look into how VSN composed his second Indian study, "A Million Mutinies," and a later Caribbean collection, "A Way of the World." These begin to prove why VSN attained his renown for careful explication; apparently he could usually put down verbatim, without notes on the scene, what he had heard each day from his discussions and observations.
A minor shortcoming of an otherwise impressive account: French tends to skimp on delving into the works themselves, especially earlier ones. He often cites critical blurbs, and summarizes a book's contents, but he tends to quote sparingly. This does quicken the pace. However, if lacking knowledge of the novels and essays first- hand, a reader may wonder why there's briefer coverage of most primary texts. On the other hand, this is not a "critical biography," so this emphasis, given French's need to interpret massive amounts of material (he acknowledges half a million words from interviews transcribed), may be understandable.
French concludes with VSN's marriage to Nadira. He bows out gracefully with a final word, "Enough." But then, typically, he adds his last footnote: "For the moment." It's perhaps a telling sign that French adapts, often, a detachment towards Pat, Margaret, and VSN that reflects his subject's own distance from the contradictions his selfishness creates. This may heighten the verisimilitude for some readers; it may irritate others. So persists his admirable, if also unsettling, diligence in an engrossing perspective on a life that surprised me in its awkwardness, secrecy, bluster, and, despite or because of it all, a wry-- if ultimately too bitter-- honesty. The cover photo by "jumped-up" (VSN's put-down) Lord Snowden shows a playful figure, pulling himself up by the untied shoelace. His shoe, for this frugal man, reveals on its sole a worn-away hole.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Scrupulously Thorough
Comment: I felt that this book took a while to get going, but once it did, it really grabbed you and held you. As a fan of Doctor Johnson, I always enjoyed Naipaul's rather robust table talk and merciless putdowns, plenty of which are served up here for our shocked and awed pleasure. I am reluctant to join the crowd of those who condemn him, as none of us, were all our mixed motives and our mean behaviour exposed as in this book, would be shown to be flawless. I'm keen to read more of Naipaul's works.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Emotional bully; outstanding writer
Comment: When V.S. Naipaul was given a copy of the completed manuscript of this biography he returned it to the author without comments or corrections; that surprising fact appears on page xi of this book; and by the time one reaches page 490, two hypothesis about why he would not change, or at least comment upon, a book that draws him in such repulsive terms remain standing: One, he never looked at the manuscript for fear of a disagreeable and emotional entanglement with it (a habit of avoidance he had carefully honed throughout his life) or, Two, his corrections would have been so massive that they would have forced an entire rewriting or rethinking of his biography, something that neither he, nor the author, would have found tolerable since truth would per force suffer deeply in any effort to redraw Naipaul as an acceptable human being. So he is here, warts and all, for all to see and sneer at.
Patrick French was given unlimited access to the entire and heretofore highly restricted Naipaul archives at the University of Tulsa; this included "his notebooks, correspondence, hand written manuscripts, financial papers, recordings, photographs, press cuttings and journals,(and those of his first wife Pat, which he had never read.)" The materials were massive and thus the book is hefty; unfortunately it is also dull. Quite possibly the sheer quantity of material led to the huge stretches of uninteresting prose which dominate the narrative.
The author remains aloof and non-judgmental about the tortures that Mr. Naipaul's narcissism inflicts on his many victims, thus depriving the story of the emotional vibrancy and color it deserves. Although the author does not condone Mr. Naipaul for his repulsive and cruel treatment of others, his detachment is at times irritating for its very coolness in the face of the dreadful situations that are being described. One thing is to shrugg off the sadomasochistic games he played with a consenting (more or less consenting) mistress, and quite another is to be neutral about the years of torture Naipaul inflicted upon a passive but adoring wife whom he eventually killed with his nonsense.
That such a profound character disorder would coexist with the capacity to write exquisite English prose remains a mystery, even though it should not: character and temperament are, perhaps astonishingly, quite independent from artistic genius, and examples abound: Picasso, Wagner and Beethoven quickly come to mind. This biography only indirectly and superficially presents the irony of a person combining a supreme mastery of writing with a miniscule sense of human compassion. Great writers are not necessarily great people.
One cannot help but draw a comparison with that other book devoted to Naipaul by his one time friend Paul Theroux: "Sir Vidia's Shadow" is flawed because if its many inaccuracies, and its motives (revenge, certainly); but never a dull momemt there. Theroux's comment upon reading the current biography was a rueful "It seems I did not know half of all the horrors." Indeed.
I would recommend this book only to the serious Naipaul scholar, for whom it is frankly an absolute necessity in terms of the historical facts it displays. I would not recommend it to the average reader or to the Naipaul fan looking for an understanding of the man.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Incomparable as a writer, a failure as a human being
Comment: While the contradiction between professional success and personal failure is hardly unusual in the world of art and literature, Naipaul's biography provides an extreme example of this incongruity - incomparable gifts as a writer and thinker and abject failure as a human being. As a fellow Caribbean national (though he strenuously rejects the significance of his origins to his work), I have long been fascinated by Naipaul's work and have read all of his books, with the exception of the glacial and impenetrable "Enigma of Arrival" still bookmarked on page 210. He has traveled a long way from the early Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street and his vision and preoccupations have expanded accordingly to encompass observations not only on post-colonial peoples but also on the human condition more broadly speaking. Along the way, he seems to have set scant store by friendship or indeed relationships. This lack of charity towards others he extended even to his longsuffering wife Pat who, when he was still in his early twenties and seeking (unsuccessfully) his way in the world, had saved him from the grim spiral of depression and nervous breakdown. French, who had full access to her diaries and to the author's private papers, provides fascinating insights into Naipaul's personal world, including the context that shaped his many novels and travel writings. Given this unprecedented access, "The World is What It Is" is likely to remain the definitive biography of the 76-year old Naipaul. I vividly remember the author's response a few years ago to the noted broadcast journalist Charlie Rose. When asked in a television interview if with the advancing years he had intimations of his own mortality, he replied that for him death would be a release. A visibly startled Charlie Rose had asked him to repeat what he had just said. This, despite all the fame and fortune he has earned and all the accolades won, including his knighthood and the Nobel Prize. Could it be that his lasting legacy will be not his superbly crafted novels and penetrating insights but his own life story as a cautionary tale?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Art Transcends Life
Comment: 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.
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Summary: "Hate oppression, fear the oppressed": an uneasy subject's unflinching gaze
Comment: This authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul has provoked controversy for its prickly subject, who read the entire manuscript and altered nothing; it's also garnered praise for its author, who drew on the entire archive of what he notes may be the last major writer who's left an entirely paper trail, instead of disc drives. I've only read a bit of Naipaul: "Among the Believers" about his travels in the non-Arab Islamic realm, and "The Return of Eva Perón," essays on Michael X, Perón's Argentina, and Conrad. After finishing French's bold, compassionate, and fair-minded study of this formidable master of masks, I will seek out more. That's a recommendation for both the irascible author and his patient chronicler. This is not a flawless analysis, therefore not five-stars, but French's careful discussion often approaches perfection. I admired (and reviewed) French's "Tibet, Tibet," a brave book that took on an iconic figure and asked similarly tough questions honestly.
Often, reviews have commented on VSN's fearsome reputation more than French's nuanced interpretation. What's needed now: a flavor of French's prose. I will excerpt how he filters VSN. French introduces his aims as a biographer: "not to sit in judgement, but to expose the subject with ruthless clarity to the calm eye of the reader." (xv) The myth, as VSN himself mentions, rests in those who follow; the writer keeps only the control over his books.
His tiny birthplace, forty miles by forty, occupies an uneasy place for self- promoting, self- entitled VSN. Self- described as "a Trinidadian of Hindu descent," he's a British subject unable to find a homeland. Marginalized, he returns to the center of the disbanded empire to seek his rightful place. The colonial society that raised him, divided by castes and religions, ethnicities and politics, could not sustain his energy. To escape, he had to assume the master's mask. Yet, Oxford "was a traditional, English, clubbable, unreal way for a young man from the Caribbean to be living, and it left him feeling lonely and unfulfilled." (91-92)
French evokes well the snobbery of the Isis student magazine for which VSN worked; the insularity of the university clashed with his hopes of a literary career that he desperately pursued while nearly starving in post- WWII, discriminatory, and hardbitten society in London. He and his student- teacher wife, virgins when they met, lived on very little. They moved from friend to flat and back. They were not suited for each other, totally, but at his young age, VSN stayed with the first shy woman who befriended him. He told her, at their age of twenty, how he resisted reforming, rebelling, or resisting. Instead, he insisted to her on being accepted.
He enters Britain at its capital core, pioneering the post- colonial counter- diasporic critique. "Legally prevented" after graduation "from migrating inside the new Commonwealth," VSN in the early 1950s sought a career in a nation with few East or West Indians. This "double exile" as "a deracinated colonial" as the Empire contracted left VSN anxious, yet determined not to retreat. With little steady work, landlords hostile at best to his presence, and widespread prejudice, he complained to his wife, Pat: "That is what the whole policy of the Free World amounts to. Naipaul, poor wog, literally starving, and very cold." (135, 137) The self- pity mingles with a level- headed appraisal of the situation for this internal exile.
"I am the spectator, the flaneur par excellence. I am free of the emancipatory fire." (qtd. 101) French deftly measures Trinidad's racial divide between Indians and blacks, He traces how Eric Williams rose to unsettling populist power there. Later, West Indian intellectual C.L.R. James early on challenged VSN for exposing the depredations of their Caribbean homelands without relativism, without the imperial context of the white man's impact. VSN rebelled against any "betraying his essence" by averting one's eye.
VSN refused to back down; as one character puts it: "Hate oppression; fear the oppressor." The emancipated dark subaltern, VSN warned (in my phrase), could be as dangerous as the retreating British sergeant. He later mused how totalitarianism often disguised itself under an "illusion of serving virtue"; writers seeking truth cannot collude with this pretense. (qtd. 469) This confident stance did not endear him to his Black Power peers, nor did it assuage the troubled consciences of many American, European, or Third World liberals.
VSN refused to back down; as one character puts it: "Hate oppression; fear the oppressor." The emancipated dark subaltern, VSN warned (in my phrase), could be as dangerous as the retreating British sergeant. This stance did not endear him to his Black Power peers, nor did it assuage the troubled consciences of many American, European, or Indian liberals.
It's sobering to find, well into his success, that VSN labored nearly destitute. He travelled to India, Africa, Trinidad, Europe frequently, but often relied on expense accounts, wealthier friends, or an absent friend of a friend's flat for accommodation. This led, however, to estrangement sexually and psychologically from loyal but bewildered Pat as his fame spread. The self- pity that he expressed to Pat early on deepened. Depression drove him to prostitutes. Shame grew; so did his capacity to transcribe follies of his fellows. He cultivated his imperious aura.
All along, as to his one-time protegee Paul Theroux, VSN rehearsed a familiar refrain. "Think of it like this: imagine the despair to which the barefoot colonial is reduced when, wanting to write, and reading the pattern books of Tolstoy, Balzac et al, he looks at his own world and discovers that it almost doesn't exist." (qtd. 269) True, but as French delicately counters, this "shrewd piece of self- presentation" repackages scholarship winning, Oxford- educated, critically lauded VSN as irredeemably "unprecedented, underprivileged, alienated." His pride and his determination segregated him from his Third World brethren, whether writers or workers. This pride kept VSN a difficult person to please despite plaudits brought by his fiction and commissions enabling his TV, radio, and print journalism.
"Ambitious, protean, made of smart material, deracinated by the accelerated politics of the end of empire, Vidia made a conscious choice to refashion himself." (209) India attracted him; the West Indies perplexed him. Out of this inability to fit in, overqualified and often overwhelmed by his intelligence and his Oxford education, where he lamented the absence of aristocrats vs. the state- scholarship students like himself and Pat, VSN's drive to succeed at the master's game made him a frank, yet brusque, critic of nearly everyone around him, no matter where he found himself writing, probing, and goading. This quality, as French tells us right away, comes from a Trinidadian "picong" attitude: "where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener sent reeling." (xi) Many fell for Sir Vidua's conversational bait over six decades. "As an accidental, occidental Indian from 'the most amusing island that ever dotted a sea,' Vidia felt included and excluded," and not only in India. (223)
He did his own including and excluding. "Vidia had a view of the world that he would do anything to maintain, just as he would sacrifice anything or anybody that stood in the way of his central purpose, to be 'the writer.'" (359) French judges that VSN could not countenance Pat as his equal. She, congenitally doomed it seems to play the "great man's wife," was cast aside by VSN as he pursued, on and off interspersed with Pat for many years, the Anglo-Argentinian Margaret Gooding. One of VSN's friends reported that his apparently captivating mistress appeared to have but fifty words in her spoken vocabulary; she does not come across, at least in English, as striking anyone of French's informants as scintillating or smart.
Documenting Naipaul's infidelity and his power over wife and lover, French through extraordinary tact paraphrases VSN's correspondence with both women. Reviewers have been aroused by the hints that French only alludes to (Margaret's literal "phallic worship" seems about it, that and his physical brutality towards her as emotionally against Pat) of sexually charged tension exploited by VSN. He's a ladies' man, despite his boorishness.
Pat reverenced her husband. I found his biographer's considerable discretion equally intriguing. As with the intelligent, isolated Pat's lonely diary and notes to her husband, these indirectly phrased letters to Margaret (who left her husband and her three children behind to be the on- off trophy VSN paraded globally) support VSN's own egotism. He moved between the two paramours; other times he lived alone. As he reduces it, he ruined Pat: "I was liberated. She was destroyed. It was inevitable." (qtd. 313)
His income under a new publisher (and endless lectures, conference invitations, and commissions for articles?) increased sevenfold after "A Bend in the River." By the '80s, he represented the frustrations of "corrected leftists," those who turned to VSN to argue why the Third World remained mired in post- colonial corruption. His judgments in "Among the Believers" appear prescient after 9/11, but when they appeared, he was derided as an Orientalist or apologist. Derek Wolcott, Edward Said, and activists who opposed his disillusion found themselves his targets. They fought back. VSN accepted Hanif Kureishi; he did not support Rushdie against the fatwa, "an extreme form of literary criticism." (qtd. 434) The title of this biography comes from the first sentence of "Bend." "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." (qtd. 386) VSN determined to be "the" writer of the harsh, globalizing, mediated, diasporic decade.
By the end of it, he earned a knighthood. He took the tube to the ceremony. VSN did not mellow, but he did express an admiration of what modernity allowed people such as himself: the pursuit of happiness that traditional mores and creeds did not allow many adherents. His own pursuits, typically, dominated his mature years. Pat died of cancer; French describes movingly their final weeks together. The day after her cremation, Nadira (a younger Pakistani Muslim journalist he had met while working on "Beyond Belief," a sequel to his earlier visits among the non-Arab Islamic world) moved in to VSN's house. Margaret learned of her ex-lover's marriage, two months later, in the newspaper; Pat had found out about-- in similarly roundabout fashion-- her husband's dalliances with prostitutes decades earlier only in a 1994 interview with The New Yorker.
After Pat's death, VSN found few with whom to mourn, perhaps understandably. His lifelong expectation of fealty, his shunning of friends, and his use or abuse of human sources may have helped him with his considerable gifts of extracting the essentials for his own journalism and travel narratives, but they did not win him many confidantes. French enlivens the discussion near the end, with a deeper look into how VSN composed his second Indian study, "A Million Mutinies," and a later Caribbean collection, "A Way of the World." These begin to prove why VSN attained his renown for careful explication; apparently he could usually put down verbatim, without notes on the scene, what he had heard each day from his discussions and observations.
A minor shortcoming of an otherwise impressive account: French tends to skimp on delving into the works themselves, especially earlier ones. He often cites critical blurbs, and summarizes a book's contents, but he tends to quote sparingly. This does quicken the pace. However, if lacking knowledge of the novels and essays first- hand, a reader may wonder why there's briefer coverage of most primary texts. On the other hand, this is not a "critical biography," so this emphasis, given French's need to interpret massive amounts of material (he acknowledges half a million words from interviews transcribed), may be understandable.
French concludes with VSN's marriage to Nadira. He bows out gracefully with a final word, "Enough." But then, typically, he adds his last footnote: "For the moment." It's perhaps a telling sign that French adapts, often, a detachment towards Pat, Margaret, and VSN that reflects his subject's own distance from the contradictions his selfishness creates. This may heighten the verisimilitude for some readers; it may irritate others. So persists his admirable, if also unsettling, diligence in an engrossing perspective on a life that surprised me in its awkwardness, secrecy, bluster, and, despite or because of it all, a wry-- if ultimately too bitter-- honesty. The cover photo by "jumped-up" (VSN's put-down) Lord Snowden shows a playful figure, pulling himself up by the untied shoelace. His shoe, for this frugal man, reveals on its sole a worn-away hole.
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