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The World Is What It Is

Biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French

Summary

Biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French

Field	Value
name	The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
image	The World Is What It Is.jpg
author	Patrick French
language	English
genre	Biography
pub_date	January 1, 2008
pages	554
isbn	9781400044054
isbn_note	Hardcover
subject	V. S. Naipaul

The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in 2008 (by Picador in the UK and Knopf in the USA). The title is the opening sentence from Naipaul's book A Bend in the River: *The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.*French deals with Naipaul's family background and his life from his birth in 1932 until his second marriage in 1996.

Reception

The biography has been reviewed by The New York Times, Literary Review, The Independent, and The Times, among others. The reviewers include Paul Theroux, who wrote an earlier book about Naipaul.

The biography won unanimous praise from all quarters including Naipaul experts Teju Cole and James Wood in the New Yorker.

Awards and honors

The biography was selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the ''Times''' "10 Best Books of 2008." It won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the British literary award the Hawthornden Prize.

References

French suggests that there may be a sequel.
Packer. (21 November 2008). "A Life Split in Two". [[The New York Times]].
Massie. "Living for Literature". [[Literary Review]].
Hussein. (4 April 2008). "The enigma of survival". [[The Independent]].
Carey. (30 March 2008). "The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of VS Naipaul by Patrick French". [[Times Online]].
Theroux. (April 6, 2008). "Paul Theroux claims new biography reveals the true monster in V S Naipaul". [[Times Online]].
Wood, James. (2008-11-24). "Wounder And Wounded".
(3 December 2008). "The 10 Best Books of 2008". [[The New York Times]].
"2008".

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

2008-non-fiction-books biographies-about-writers hawthornden-prize–winning-works national-book-critics-circle-award–winning-works

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