Luckily for writers, you don’t have to be a “good” person to write good literature. Patrick French‘s authorized biography of Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, whose work I have always admired, shows the ambitious author as self-centered, duplicitous, lustful, arrogant, and frequently rude. That is, human. The World Is What It Is, for which Naipaul consented to extended interviews and allowed French exclusive [...]
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An ignoble effort from the Nobel Laureate
by Rick Skwiot December 8, 2010 BooksI was a sympathetic reader going in. I have read and admired V.S. Naipaul’s fiction and nonfiction for decades. I anticipated his newest tome, The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, enough to pre-order it. But I came away disappointed not only in the book but in the Nobel Prize-winning author as well. It [...]