Patrick french naipaul
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The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
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 year-old boy whose parents were imprisoned for debt and who toiled in Warren's Blacking Factory is father to the man who wrote David Copperfield. But I was ashamed to learn only now, in Michael Slater's new biography, Charles Dickens, that the autobiographical background of David Copperfield was completely unknown to Dickens's huge contemporary fan base - hundreds of thousands of people who bought his novels in their serial form, subscribed to the magazines he published for twenty years, attended the marvel
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The World Is What It Is
Patrick French has been granted unique access to V.S. Naipaul's private papers and his personal recollections. With respect for Naipaul's formidable body of work, he has produced a luminous account of one of the most compelling literary figures of the last fifty years. Beginning in Trinidad, where V.S. Naipaul was born into an Indian family, French examines early privations, Naipaul's first recollections, his life within a displaced community, and his talent and fierce ambition at school, which won him a scholarship to Oxford at the age of seventeen. He describes how, once in England, homesickness and depression struck with great force, and the ways in which Naipaul's first wife helped him to cope with his ‘double exile’.
They were to stay, tenuously, together for over four decades, even after Naipaul embarked on an intense, 25 year affair that was to inspire a second wave of work. Naipaul's extraordinary gift - producing, masterpieces of both fiction and n
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Reading Patrick French’s hefty biography of VS Naipaul brought back memories of my once playing Mahjong with incipient conjunctivitis; the game was challenging enough without the tile details going in and out of focus.
French’s writing style in general has little appeal for me – a little dry and academic – and when he presents, as he often does in this tome, a lengthy, name-dropping paragraph, the hotchpotch of third-party comments and attributed quotes undermines clarity. Things become a little blurred – my response was often to skip ahead.
Ploughing through ‘The World Is What It Is’, inom was also reminded of a lecturer long ago who recited his words of wisdom to us students while absently leafing through the pages of a newspaper. Like that academic, French is not, for me, a natural at engaging with his audience.
Published in , this authorised biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author covers Naipaul’s life from his birth in to his second marriage in The author, who won the Boo