The World Is What It Is
Published on 4. November 2008
576 pages
978-0-307-27035-1 (ISBN)
Description
The 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.
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.
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11/2009
Vintage Books
€22.90
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11/2008
Knopf Publishing Group
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Person
Patrick French was born in England in 1966 and studied literature at Edinburgh University. He is the author of Younghusband; Liberty or Death; Tibet, Tibet; and The World Is What It Is, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hawthornden Prize. French is the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award. He died in 2023.
Content
- Intro
- Other Books by This Author
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction
- Part One
- One: The New World
- Two: In the Lion House
- Three: "Like Oliver Twist in the Workhouse"
- Four: To the Mother Country
- Five: "De Portu Hispaniensi in Trinitatis Insula"
- Six: "I Love You, My Dear Pat"
- Seven: To the Empty House
- Eight: "They Want Me to Know My Place"
- Nine: "Something Rich Like Chocolate"
- Ten: Back to the New World
- Eleven: "He Ashed for 10 Gns!!"
- Twelve: "There Wasn't Any Kind Remark"
- Part Two
- Thirteen: The Homecoming
- Fourteen: "Lovely Vogue, Just Bought"
- Fifteen: The Schintsky Method
- Sixteen: The World
- Seventeen: "With the Aid of a Cutlass Blade"
- Eighteen: Margarita
- Nineteen: England and Argentina
- Twenty: The Marriage of Mandrax and Valium
- Twenty-One: "I Want to Win and Win and Win"
- Twenty-Two: A House for Mr. Naipaul
- Twenty-Three: "Undoing My Semi-Colons"
- Twenty-Four: Arise, Sir Vidia
- Twenty-Five: The Second Lady Naipaul
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Illustration Credits
- A Note About the Author
- Photo insert
