The World Is What It Is

PRAISE FOR PATRICK FRENCH'S "THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS" "A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth. V.S. Naipaul wanted his monument built while he was still alive, and, sticking to his own ruthless literary code, he was willing to pay the full price....Now Naipaul has his monument, "The World Is What It Is" is fully worthy of its subject, with all the dramatic pacing, the insight and the pathos of a first-rate novel. It is a magnificent tribute to the painful and unlikely struggled by which the grandson of indentured Indian workers, born in the small island colony of Trinidad, made himself into the greatest English novelist of the past half century. It is also a portrait of the artist as a monster. How these two judgments can be simultaneously true is one of this book's central questions. Whether Naipaul himself understand the enormity of the story to which he contributed so much candor is another....rich narrative....impossible to put down....Pat's voice is faltering and uncertain where Naipaul's is relentlessly in command, but its small observations, evasions and sudden bolts of understanding haunt the reader up until her death of cancer, which gives this story its heartbreaking end."- George Packer, on the cover of the "New York Times Book Review""a prodigious achievement, a wonderful biography, a justification for the art of biography itself."- A. N. Wilson, "Times Literary Supplement" "astonishing (and astonishingly "authorized")....With the aid of this exhaustive and efficient biography, one can make some more-educated surmises about the connection between Naipaul's rigidly maintained exterior and the many layers ofinsecurity...that underlie it....shrewd and intelligent."- Christopher Hitchens, "The Atlantic" "I doubted whether an honest book could be written by anyone while Naipaul was still alive. I was wrong. The truth is not skimped in Patrick French's excellent book....The great merit of a superb biography, such as this one, is that it can deepen our understanding of the literary character by telling us more about its creator....French...gets it right."- Ian Buruma, "The New York Review of Books""extraordinary biography....French has handled an immense amount of materials with a deft hand, and the reader actually wishes he had extended the book's 487 pages of text and pursued his subject pas 1996....authorized but not compromised....It's hard to see how French could have been more objective if his subject had been dead for ten years....French is so thorough that it's likely no further biography of Naipaul, at least one covering the first sixty-odd years of his life, will ever be needed....French is very good on Naipaul's writing...."The World Is What It Is" adds depth and clarity to the discussion of Naipaul's work....French has met his own rigorous standards and, one feels, Sir Vidia's as well."- Allen Barra, "Bookforum" "one of the sprightliest, most gripping, most intellectually curious, and well, "funniest" biographies of a living writer...to come along in years....Mr. French is a relative rarity among biographers, a real writer, and at his best he sounds like a combination of that wily bohemian Geoff Dyer and that wittily matter-of-factual cyborg Michael Kinsley. Even the cameos in Mr. French's biography are crazily vivid....crafty and inquisitive book....Mr.French quickly and adroitly steps back to give us a wide-angled and morally complicated view....vivid prose....Mr. French writes with wit and feeling."- Dwight Garner, "The New York Times" "nuanced and generous....distinguished biography, one that aims to understand rather than simplistically condone or chastise....a superb, clear-eyed study, always sympathetic, balanced and thoughtful, as well as rich in what Joseph Conrad called 'the fascinat

Patrick French is the author of Younghusband, Liberty or Death and Tibet, Tibet, and is a winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award.