This book would be a great gift from a parent to a child who is interested in becoming a writer. When Junior discovers that winning the Nobel Prize in Literature at age 69 entails spending most of ones decades depressed, impoverished, ignored, and bitter, he will likely knuckle under and agree to pursue radiology.
Perhaps the best evidence of Naipaul’s fair-mindedness is that he authorized this biography by Patrick French. The book is unsparing in its treatment of the subject’s petulance, whoring, abuse of and ingratitude towards those who had helped him, and other character flaws that most of us would wish to conceal.
Posted February 22, 2009 at 5:33pm
