The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781400079803)

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.

Author: Patrick French
ISBN-10: 1400079802
ISBN-13: 9781400079803
Publisher: Vintage
Language: English
Published: 11/03/2009
Pages: 592
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.63lbs
Size: 9.26h x 6.30w x 1.19d

Review Citation(s):
Entertainment Weekly 11/13/2009 pg. 99
New York Times Book Review 11/22/2009 pg. 22