RollnSmoke Reviews: THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul

THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Patrick French, Knopf, 2008). When I chose this fat book from the shelf, I had a vague idea of who V.S. Naipaul is – I’d read A Bend in the River – and knew that he’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, but I had no idea I would find his life story so irresistibly – I couldn’t put this book down!

Naipaul was born to a poor East Indian Brahmin family in colonial Trinidad in 1932 and rose to become a great writer, at once outrageous, funny and offensive. Vividly written to reveal the truth of an imperfect life, biographer Patrick French shows how Naipaul struggles in constant exile – neither Indian nor British nor islander – a writer of the world without a homeland – to achieve a writing style that is a combination of travel, fiction, history, politics, literary criticism and autobiography.

What is most interesting about Naipaul’s life, however, is his fascinating relationships with women: His mother, always poor and at home in Trinidad, whom he refuses to see towards the end of her life; his tragic, literary spouse, Pat, whom he relentlessly taps for deep and comforting loyalty; his own claim to once “being a great prostitute man”; his lover, Margaret, an Anglo-Argentine, with whom he has a torrid and twisted affair for 24 years; his sister, Kamla, to whom he is devoted during his lifetime; and his second wife, Nadira, a divorced journalist from Kenya and Pakistan, whom he marries directly after Pat’s death from cancer. Indeed it is his relationships with these women that bring his full writing character to the fore: “His scope, irascibility, outsider status, rudeness, Pat’s silent presence.” (9.5/10).