Word: naipaul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...impossible to read “North of South,” Shiva Naipaul’s cynical yet deeply moving account of a late 1970s journey through East Africa, without being reminded of the travel writings of his legendary elder brother, V.S. Naipaul. Only 40 when he died of a heart attack in 1985, the unfortunate younger Naipaul cannot escape comparisons to his sibling, older by 13 years and a literary behemoth and Nobel Laureate often described as Britain’s greatest living writer. Shiva Naipaul’s work is more than worthy of notice...
...writer alive has been so fully canonized as V. S. Naipaul. He won the Booker, was knighted, had a great masterpiece published (“Bend In the River”), and won the Nobel Prize (too late, he claimed, for it to make him happy). This year he received the compliment of an accomplished warts-and-all biography (lesser writers receive praise while they’re living, and are damned when they’re dead). But he is miserable. Every time he writes a novel he claims it will be his last—because novels...
Even more surprising is to see Naipaul as a boy showing off for girls with his acrobatics and singing "Ol' Man River" as he darns his socks. Much of his mischief and provokingness he got from his Caribbean origins, he acknowledges; and to see the calypso Naipaul before he began taking snuff from a silver spoon is to see a much more human and endearing figure than the master usually admits...
Excavating Pat's diary and the writer's own journal and talking to more than a hundred people on several continents, French grippingly develops an account of the writer's life as cool and undeluded as Naipaul's former friend Paul Theroux's was rivetingly emotional. Though he remains deeply sympathetic to Pat, who gave herself over without complaint to a man she was convinced was a genius, French is otherwise as plainspoken as his subject: the critic Clive James is "an ill-favoured Australian humorist." Naipaul's second wife Nadira he calls "dyslexic, emotional, fairly scandalous...
...central question the book raises is how much inhumanity is justified in the cultivation of a talent--especially in an age when (as Naipaul is shrewd enough to realize) writers are judged on the basis of their personality more than their art. Even as he turned himself into a bespoke English gentleman, after all, while Pat became the obedient and self-denying Indian wife of legend, Naipaul's strength lay not just in the clarity of his observations but in the passion--the grief and terror and rage--that trembled just beneath them. When Pat finally died, in 1996, French...