Word: naipaul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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While Pat, his adoring and self-sacrificing wife of 40 years, was on her deathbed, V.S. Naipaul was zipping around Pakistan with a new, much younger companion, angry, as she later reported, that his wife "was not dying fast enough because he wanted to carry on with his life." The day after Pat's cremation, he brought the younger woman into their home to be his second wife. "Would you say you have had a happy life?" the Nobel-winning novelist records asking Pat in his diary. "No direct answer," he writes. "It was perhaps my own fault," comes...
Such shocking moments--and startling candor--are everywhere in The World Is What It Is (Knopf; 554 pages), a biography of Naipaul by the British writer Patrick French that is as haunting and harrowing a psychological document as you could ask for. Telling the life of the famously exacting writer has long seemed a daunting prospect, not least because he has written so often and with such unsparing honesty about his ambitions and insecurities. But French pursues his prey with an acuity worthy of the man himself. That this unsettling record is an authorized biography says something impressive about both...
...particular achievement of The World is to flesh out the two potent forces that Naipaul has often seemed to repress: women and Trinidad, where he grew up. The abstemious Brahmin vegetarian who looked away from the movie screen whenever a kissing scene was shown, even after his marriage, is here revealed as a writer of wildly sensual letters whose mistress of 24 years called him "the Lion King" and drew sketches of his manhood in all its naked glory. That did not stop him from seeing her through three abortions and being, in his alarming words, "very violent with...
Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday night with his novel, The White Tiger, joining a pantheon of past Booker winners that includes such literary giants as V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis and Salman Rushdie. It was a remarkable victory for Adiga, a 33-year-old first-time novelist who spent part of his youth in the Indian city of Mangalore and now lives in Bombay. As an old friend of his, I was sitting at the table with Adiga in London's Guildhall when he won, surrounded by people from his U.K. publishing house...
...hosts a rich daily marketplace of complaints, ranging from tribal members demanding compensation for lost land and farmers seeking better prices for their crops, to demonstrators demanding greater rights for women and gays, and everyone in between. The 18th century observatory is now witness to what the writer V.S. Naipaul called "India's million mutinies" - the dizzying array of fault lines, small and large, that fracture this heterogeneous nation of 1.1 billion...