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Author(s): Patrick French
Publisher: Knopf
Format: Hardcover
List Price: Rs. 1,458
Category: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN-13: 978-1400044054
ISBN-10: 1400044057
Language: English
Pages: 576
Dimensions:
Age Range: All Ages
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Overview:
A luminous—often startling—life of the Nobel laureate, one of the most compelling literary figures of the past half century.
Beginning with a richly detailed portrait of V. S. Naipaul’s childhood in colonial Trinidad, Patrick French gives us the boy born to an Indian family, the displaced soul in a displaced community, who by dint of talent and ambition finds the only imaginable way out: a scholarship to Oxford at the age of seventeen. London in the 1950s offers hope and his first literary success, but homesickness and depression almost defeat Vidia, his narrow escape aided by Patricia Hale, an Englishwoman who will devote herself to his work and well-being. She will stand by him, sometimes tenuously, for more than four decades, even as Naipaul embarks on a twenty-four-year affair, which will awaken half-dead passions and feed perhaps his greatest wave of dizzying creativity. Amid this harrowing emotional life, French traces the course of the fierce visionary impulse underlying Naipaul’s singular power, a gift to produce masterpieces of fiction and nonfiction.
Informed by exclusive access to V. S. Naipaul’s private papers and personal recollections, and by great feeling for his formidable body of work, French’s revelatory biography does full justice to an enigmatic genius.