The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is (2008) - Plot & Excerpts
The book is excellently written, compelling and shocking in equal measure and a painful reminder of the trauma inflicted on a child of the post colonial racial confusion and colour/class consciousness still painfully evident in Trinidadian society. It achieves this through the recounting of the legendary, pathetic, tragic - albeit prolific - life of VS Naipaul. The book left me with my dilemma over Naipaul fully intact. French quotes Linton Kwesi Johnson on Naipaul 'He's a living example of how art transcends the artist 'cos he talks a load of shit but still writes excellent books. A sentiment with which I entirely agree. VS Naipaul remains a controversial figure because of the contradiction of his snobbery, arrogance and racism with the precision, incisiveness and eloquence of his prose. The book confirmed my contempt for what Nigerian critic Okwui Enwezor describes as Naipaul's 'noxious writings' and further confirmed Edward Said's observation (recently quoted in Joseph O'Neil's article in The Atlantic Sept 2011) in which he pertinently pointed out that ' Naipaul’s account of the Islamic, Latin American, African, Indian and Caribbean worlds totally ignores a massive infusion of critical scholarship about those regions in favor of the tritest, cheapest and the easiest of colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies, myths that even Lord Cromer and Forster’s Turtons and Burtons would have been embarrassed to trade in outside their private clubs.' Naipaul is indeed a both highly gifted and truly odious character who seems to suffer from a virulent strain of compulsive obsessive disorder which he tacitly passes off as evidence of his purported Brahminic heritage. Does it matter that he is so wicked if his books are good.....? Maybe not ... but this is a good read to understand the background of a disturbed post colonial paradox....glad my wife daughter and I walked out of his lecture at UWI in Trinidad a few years ago he really is disgusting and the book reveals why It must be difficult to write the biography of a writer of V. S. Naipaul's caliber. No living writer in the English language surpasses him in sheer talent, and I am hard-pressed to think of an equal. A reader familiar with Naipaul's flawless prose and witheringly cruel personal observations will inevitably expect similar talent from the writer's biographer. And if Patrick French does not here deliver the impossible, he at least comes close. The purely literary difficulties are compounded by the distasteful nature of the subject. No one without an iron stomach could so completely immerse himself in the life of the most personally loathsome literary figure alive today. I read several reviews of this book before reading it myself, and all of them have marveled at the level of access that Naipaul granted French. In the end he made no demands for changes, either. As far as I can tell, this has been uniformly misinterpreted by the reviewers as courage on the part of Naipaul, or at least a disdain for what people think of him. What the reviewers don't understand -- and what should be obvious after nearly 500 pages -- is that Naipaul revels in his own infamy, and for the past several decades at least has cultivated it in a way that can only be judged deliberate. French is charitable in saying that "his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility." This is a charming -- almost Naipaulian -- turn of phrase, but it is only half-true, and by that I mean to say that everything V. S. Naipaul does is an act of narcissism alone, because he does not have a molecule of humility in his body. Indeed, reading this book is confirmation of why Naipaul's racism and colonial apologetics cannot be ascribed to "self-hatred." V.S. Naipaul may be afflicted with many things, but insufficient self-regard is not one of them. If he wanted to "escape" from Trinidad it is only because he regarded himself as so much better than everyone else there. Repeatedly, after lengthy and detail-rich discussions of the pain he caused other people -- more often than not those closest to him -- Naipaul's statements to French are full of self-pity, with pro forma concern for others tacked on in such a way that it is hard to escape the conclusion that Naipaul might be an outright sociopath.The book has several faults:(1) Indulgence of its subject's cranky politics, including his pretensions to "honesty." Edward Said was correct in saying of Naipaul's work that "what is seen as crucially informative and telling . . . - [e.g.,:] accounts of the Indian darkness or the Arab predicament - is precisely what is weakest about it: with reference to the actualities it is ignorant, illiterate, and cliché-ridden." Throughout the book French presents Naipaul as the foe of orthodoxy, and even slags off "political correctness," even though his ideas about Third World backwardness are the real, prevailing orthodoxy on the middlebrow opinion pages and in the State Departments and Foreign Services of the world's richest countries.(2) Overattention to Naipaul's distasteful sex life. It is impossible to write a good biography without discussing his tortured first marriage to Patricia Hale; his long affair with Margaret Gooding; his unceremonious dumping of Gooding in favor of his current wife Nadira shortly after Patricia died (Margaret found out about the wedding from the papers); and even his frequent visits to prostitutes early in his marriage to Patricia (a fact he revealed only late in life, to the newspapers, while Patricia was dying of cancer -- another classic Naipaulian touch, that). The problem is that French gives a pass to -- or at least over-tolerates -- his subject's awful politics and petty bigotry, but makes up for it by documenting this aspect of his personal life in gruesome detail. And indeed no sane person could fail to be appalled, though we could all be spared the fact that, for example, V.S. Naipaul's airhead mistress -- at his instigation -- had taken to referring to the penis of the future Nobel laureate as a Hindu "god" and wrote that she wanted to worship at the temple. (And indeed, by the time you are finished reading this sentence you will know that she also once sent him "a 1:1 scale drawing of his erect penis, done in dark-brown felt-tip; the penis wore sunglasses and a lime-green cowboy hat." Patrick French is responsible for the fact that this image will never leave my head, and now I am responsible for the fact that it will never leave yours.) But all of this is mixed in with rich discussion of the family life that birthed "A House for Mr. Biswas" and other treasures; a pathetic yet ultimately moving portrayal of Patricia Hale; well-done portraits of the others in Naipaul's life (Paul Theroux, author of the vengeful "Sir Vidia's Shadow," comes off more as a starstruck groupie than an actual friend of any kind); and an occasionally harrowing account of the creative process, particularly in the cases of "Guerrillas" and "A Bend In the River." All told, if you're going to read a recent biography, this is the one.
What do You think about The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is (2008)?
Great biography of an amazing author who just happens to be a complete arsehole.
—nao
