As a brilliant writer - and I am a fan of his - Napaul's essays, novels, commentary and fiction span about four decades and the continents of Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America and Europe. As a writer his range is amazing, his prose polished, his descriptions vivid and his imagination fertile. He writes harshly and plainly, offending many. His critics are equally harsh with him.
This book took a decade to write. French, a British writer, painstakingly traveled to all the places Naipaul went to, interviewed people, poured over thousands of pages of documents, journals and reviews, to prepare for the writing of the book. He is neither for or against Naipaul. He presents the human face of Naipaul, one that many people miss when they write or talk about him.
Naipaul is a complicated man. He is full of neurosis, complexes and difficulty in establishing and maintaining relationships. Critics and friends have called him 'racist', 'miserly' and 'unkind'. He had a long and seemingly cruel marriage with a British woman - Patricia Hale - whom he met at Oxford. They had a troubled relationship, childless and sexually frustrating. He says in his journals 'he didn't know much about sex and nor did she'. He had a long extra marital relationship with an Argentinean woman called Margaret Murray. When Naipaul's wife died, three months later he married a Pakistani woman, Nadira.
A few weeks before his book was released in India, the media highlighted Naipual's admisison of visiting prostitutes and paying for sex. Many were intrigued by this and commented on it as well. In the book, however, it comes across as more humane than it would be as reported in the media. And, his relationships with Pat, his wife and Margaret, his mistress were indeed complicated and troublesome.
I like the book. French takes great pain to bring a balance to his writing by covering the many faces of Naipaul. Having read almost all the books written by Naipaul, in some ways, it's like going over the books again. although in a parallel journey. The book is intimate, easy to read and a marvelous portrait of a flawed and great man.
As French writes: My approach to writing biography is as it was when I began my first book. I wrote then that the aim of the biographer should not be to sit in judgement, but to expose the subject with ruthless clarity to the calm eye of the reader. Since writing about the writer for the first time, I have become more doubtful about the emotion that an artistic creator should be expected to explain himself. Anyone who has written imaginatively will know that the process remains mysterious, even to the author, however hard you try to unpick it. The best writing can be examined only in its effect.
He goes further to say: A biographer can never fully reveal the source of its subject. The commonplace that a biographer has found the 'key' to a person's life - usually something as arbitrary like the death of a sibling, or moving house - is implausible. People are too complicated and inconsistent for this to be true. The best a biographer can hope for is to illuminate aspects of a life and seek to give glimpses of the subject, and that way tell a story.
And, French does this well, with Naipaul as his inspiration.
