The World Is What It Is by Patrick French
Patrick French has been granted unique access to V.S. Naipaul's private papers and his personal recollections. With great feeling for Naipaul's formidable body of work, he has produced a luminous account of the most compelling literary figure of the last fifty years. Beginning in rich and evocative detail 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, twenty-five year affair that was to inspire a second wave of breathtaking creation.Naipaul's extraordinary gift - producing, uniquely, masterpieces of both fiction and non-fiction - is born of a forceful, visionary impulse, whose roots Patrick French traces with a sympathetic brilliance and devastating insight that does full justice to this enigmatic genius.
Patrick French is the prize-winning author of Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division; Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land; and Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer. He lives in London.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780330433501 |
| ISBN 10 | 0330433504 |
| Title | The World Is What It Is |
| Author | Patrick French |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Pan Macmillan |
| Year published | 2008-04-04 |
| Number of pages | 592 |
| Prizes | Short-listed for BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize 2008 (UK) |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |