Schulman, Sam. "Good Writers. Bad Men. Does It Matter?" IN CHARACTER: A JOURNAL OF EVERYDAY VIRTUES March 30, 2010.

A great majority of us have done discreditable, even cruel things in our lives, even after we have ceased to be children. And the great majority of that majority find it in our hearts to forgive ourselves, and to think more about how we have been injured than the injuries we have made. But it seems to matter more when a writer or artist behaves badly. Why should it? If my dentist loves one of his daughters more than any of his other children, or a Boeing engineer is having an affair with her best friend's husband, it is cruel. But their cruelties don't impair the quality of my bridgework or disturb my tendency to sleep peacefully through take-offs and landings. Why does the bad character of a writer or artist matters so much more? And how does "mattering" work? Big biographies of major authors tend to raise or lower their subjects in the esteem of their publics: Flannery O'Connor, up; John Cheever, not so much. But when there is a big revelation - especially a revelation of weakness or worse - there is a stimulus effect. The reputation of Philip Larkin has never recovered from his friend Andrew Motion's biography, which pointed out repeatedly that he, Motion, though a pretty dreadful poet, is a far better human being than Larkin was. Readers knew about John Cheever's alcoholism and his bisexual priapism from his journals, first published in the same magazine which published his beautiful short stories and from the complaining memoirs of his daughter before Brad Bailey's Cheever biography of last year. The big shock of the year, however, was the "authorized biography" of V.S. Naipaul, by Patrick French: The World Is What it is. French's book shocked only partly because of the story it told, the real surprise was that Naipaul collaborated so completely with its telling. . . . Read the rest here: http://incharacter.org/review/good-writers-bad-men-does-it-matter/.

Wood, James. "Wounder and Wounded." NEW YORKER December 1, 2008.

French, Patrick. The World is What It is: the Authorized Biography Of V. S. Naipaul. London: Picador, 2008. The Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy writes of the two voices in Kipling, which have been called the saxophone and the oboe. The first is the hard, militaristic, imperialist writer, and the second is the Kipling infused with Indianness, with admiration for the subcontinent’s cultures. Naipaul has a saxophone and an oboe, too, a hard sound and a softer one. These two sides could be called the Wounder and the Wounded. The Wounder is by now well known—the source of fascinated hatred in the literary world and postcolonial academic studies. He disdains the country he came from: “I was born there, yes. I thought it was a mistake.” When he won the Nobel Prize, in 2001, he said it was “a great tribute to both England, my home, and India, the home of my ancestors.” Asked why he had omitted Trinidad, he said that he feared it would “encumber the tribute.” He has written of the “barbarism” and “primitivism” of African societies, and has fixated, when writing about India, on public defecation. (“They defecate on the hills; they defecate on the riverbanks; they defecate on the streets.”) When asked for his favorite writers, he replies, “My father.” He is socially successful but deliberately friendless, an empire of one: “At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.” The Wounder, we learn from Patrick French’s extraordinary biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is (Knopf; $30), used and used up his first wife, Patricia Hale, sometimes depending on her, at other times ignoring her, often berating and humiliating her. And French’s biography, published earlier this year in Britain, is already notorious for a revelation that can only enrich our luxury of loathing: in 1972, Naipaul began a long, tortured, sadomasochistic affair with an Anglo-Argentine woman, Margaret Gooding. It was an intensely sexual relationship, which enacted, on Naipaul’s side, fantasies of cruelty and domination. On one occasion, jealous because Margaret was with another man, he said that he was “very violent with her for two days with my hand. . . . Her face was bad. She couldn’t really appear in public.” The Wounded Naipaul is the writer who returns obsessively to the struggle, shame, and impoverished fragility of his early life in Trinidad; to the unlikely journey he made from the colonial rim of the British Empire to its metropolitan center; and to the precariousness, as he sees it, of his long life in England—“a stranger here, with the nerves of the stranger,” as he puts it in The Enigma of Arrival (1987). Again and again, his sense of aggrieved encirclement expands to encompass others, and he manages, with neither vanity nor condescension, to blend his woundedness with theirs: the empire of one is colonized by his characters. They range from the major to the minor, from the educated to the almost illiterate, from the real to the fictional, but they are united by their homelessness. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/12/01/081201crbo_books_wood?currentPage=all.

Bottum, Joseph. "Sir Vidia's Dance: Can Life and Art be Separated?" WEEKLY STANDARD November 17, 2008.

French, Patrick. The World is What It is: the Authorized Biography Of V. S. Naipaul. London: Picador, 2008. During a brief remission in his wife's cancer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist V.S. Naipaul casually explained to a journalist that he had always been "a great prostitute man," mongering among the whores from the early days of his marriage. The publicity that followed from the remark "consumed" his wife, he later admitted to his biographer, Patrick French. "She had all the relapses and everything after that. She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. .  .  . I feel a little bit that way." Unfortunately, he didn't feel "that way" enough to think it inappropriate to move into his house, the day after he cremated his wife, his new mistress, a Pakistani journalist he'd just met (and would, in short order, marry). Even before the whoring revelations, Naipaul's first wife, a middle-class woman named Patricia Hale whom he'd met while he was a student on scholarship to England, had known about a prior mistress--but only because Naipaul himself decided one day to tell her, explaining the violent acts he enjoyed with the woman, some of them memorialized in photographs he brought along to aid the explanation. The woman's name was Margaret Gooding, and Naipaul met her in 1972 in Buenos Aires. French's new biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, quotes extensively from her letters: unbearable scrawls that read like clinical case studies drawn from the pages of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. She begs, moans, despairs, and pleads for Naipaul's "cruel sexual desires." She calls him her "god," her "black master." Her multiple abortions of his children sicken her, but she offers them up to him as proof of her love and abasement. And all this sex stuff is only the beginning. Throughout The World Is What It Is Naipaul shows himself arrogant beyond belief, and vile-tempered, and as self-obsessed as a man simpering while he looks at himself in the mirror. His letters and conversation are full of references to "niggers" and dismissals of Africans and dark-skinned Indians. The man was capable of bouts of extraordinary cruelty: Unhappy with Margaret at one point, Naipaul explains, "I was very violent with her for two days. .  .  . Her face was bad. She couldn't appear really in public. My hand was swollen." But then, he was capable of ordinary, everyday cruelty, as well: "You are the only woman I know who has no skill," his wife's diaries reveal Naipaul once told her, just in passing. "You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above her station." He moved on to the mistress who would become his second wife because his inamorata Margaret had simply grown unworthy of his use: "middle-aged, almost an old lady." Vile stuff. I didn't need to know all this about Naipaul. I didn't want to know all this about the man. But the weird thing is that Naipaul himself wants us to know all this. The subtitle makes that clear enough: "The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul." The novelist turned over his papers to French and sat for interview after interview, apparently hiding nothing--all in the course of authorizing this account of his life. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=15793&R=13CD537152.

Buruma, Ian. "The Lessons of the Master." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS November 20, 2008.

French, Patrick. The World is What It is: the Authorized Biography Of V. S. Naipaul. London: Picador, 2008. Many writers—myself included—owe a great debt to V.S. ("Vidia") Naipaul. He opened up new literary possibilities, ways of seeing and describing the world, especially the non-Western world. The hardest thing for admirers is to avoid imitating him. To sound like a writer one respects may be a sincere form of flattery, but it is also a profound misunderstanding of what makes Naipaul, or indeed any good writer, extraordinary. Finding his own voice is something of an obsession to which Naipaul returns often in his reflections on writing: the constant search for his place in the world, a unique perspective, a writerly compass. Naipaul's voice, which some younger writers are tempted to mimic, cannot be defined by citing his opinions on race, the colonial experience, India, literature, or anything else. His views are frequently designed to shock and outrage, thrown out, especially in interviews, as a kind of smokescreen to protect the autonomy of "the writer." No, what makes Naipaul's writing so inspiring is the way he makes an art out of experience, travel, careful scrutiny of the physical world, and sharp analysis of ideas, history, culture, politics. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22062.

Editorial: "Calabashing Naipaul." STABROEK NEWS June 12, 2008.

Before his long harangue of V. S. Naipaul was read at the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica, Derek Walcott spoke at length about film, music and the state of West Indian literature. Among his many thoughtful asides, he spoke about the difficulty of finding a voice in the relative obscurity of the modern Caribbean. “The new American empire,” he told the poet Kwame Dawes (to intermittent applause), “is the world empire, and whatever the tastes of the empire are, they’re inflicted on the colonies… we are the intellectual colonies of America; so is a lot of the world. So if people say in America… that you don’t tell stories, you don’t mould character, you don’t have a beginning, a middle, an end. That’s old fashioned. Well, it’s a great thing that the Caribbean art is old-fashioned, because you still tell stories, which is what the human heart craves.” For many of us, Walcott included, the early novels of VS Naipaul answered this craving. They told our stories with a fond attention to the peculiarities of West Indian life, and a humorous truthfulness that has rarely, if ever, been equalled. Naipaul’s genius for evocative details caught the lilt and rhythm of West Indian speech perfectly, and his sense of what might be called the Caribbean Quixotic, framed a generation of political dreamers in unforgiving and unforgettable prose. His ascent into the highest rank of world literature refuted his now infamous jibe that “nothing was created in the West Indies.” Along the way, whatever his failings, he was still our misanthrope. Then, something changed. He refashioned himself as an exclusively British writer – in many ways he had always been British, just with West Indian roots – and his long leave-taking of the Caribbean ended with a tribute to “India, home of my ancestors” in his Nobel acceptance speech. . . . (Thanks to Mark McWatt for the link.) Read the whole article here: http://www.stabroeknews.com/?p=14572.

Trilling, Daniel. "Rhyme and Punishment for Naipaul." GUARDIAN June 1, 2008.

Walcott's new poem, "The Mongoose," is a fast-paced, savagely humorous demolition of Naipaul's work and personality that begins with the opening salvo: 'I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction.' It was premiered at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica. Telling the audience, 'I think you'll recognise Mr Naipaul ... I'm going to be nasty', Walcott launched into The Mongoose amid a hubbub of surprised gasps and nervous laughter from the crowd. . . . Read the rest here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2283291,00.html.

Price, Matthew. "The World is Not Enough." THE NATIONAL May 15, 2008.

Depending on where you stand, V. S. Naipaul is either a grand old man of letters or a grand old grump. Rightly famed for his steady literary output, Naipaul is also infamous for his provocations. Whether he’s saying something nasty about Muslims or defending snobbery, when Naipaul speaks, you can almost guarantee there will be an uproar. For Naipaul, now 75, being disagreeable is a way of being alive; he likes to wind people up – and he generally succeeds. In Britain, Sir Vidia is practically a national institution of literary gossip; he’s given up writing novels, but his bluster keeps him in the papers. (An anthology of Naipaul’s vituperations would be immense, but his spleen is captured in his remarks about the people of Trinidad, where he was born in 1932: “These people live purely physical lives, which I find contemptible ... It makes them interesting only to chaps in universities who want to do compassionate studies about brutes.”) For an alleged recluse who lives in the English countryside, Naipaul has always had a way of generating publicity. The English literary classes seem obsessed with his private life, and the recent publication of The World is What It Is, Patrick French’s authorised life of Naipaul, has given them plenty to chatter about. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080515/REVIEW/749012124/1093.

Nayar, Radhakrishnan. "A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION March 13, 2008.

Great writers can be impatient, quirky, rudely iconoclastic literary critics. It is almost a professional deformity. They achieve greatness through a stern commitment to sharply individual visions of the world and methods of description and narrative. It leads easily to the idea that those who see and describe differently have nothing to offer. With many literary lions, the thought that it takes many sorts of books to make a rich literature doesn't sit easily. No eminent writer has indulged in the favourite sport of his tribe as savagely as V. S. Naipaul. He has opined that Jane Austen's novels are little more than gossip, that E. M. Forster was just a pederast touting empty riddles, and that there was nothing to be got from the writings about Dublin of that blind man living in Trieste, James Joyce. But Naipaul is also, when he wants to be, a careful literary critic, full of startling insights. His sovereign contempt for authorities and schools is deeply refreshing. In this book of essays he is commenting on other writers - Flaubert, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, Derek Walcott, among others - but he is really telling us how he got the language and the ways of seeing that have made his books the most provocative and cruel literary analysis we have of the post-colonial situation. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=401033&sectioncode=26.

Flatt, Molly. "Criticism's Vocabulary of Cruelty." GUARDIAN BOOKS BLOG May 19, 2008.

Literary criticism is famously red in tooth and claw. Terry Eagleton, Mary McCarthy and Dale Peck are just a few reviewers who have made their names with funny and often frankly showy cruelty. With the book market more crowded than ever before, a bracing and briny critique can be just the thing to cut through the prettily packaged chaff. As Eaves pointed out, critics are brokers, advising readers where to invest their time and money with a duty to the often less-than-lenient truth - an image that is especially appealing to bloggers, avowedly fearless mouthpieces for the common man. Moreover, in his article this week on the notoriously prickly VS Naipaul's new work of criticism, A Writer's People, Radhakrishan Nayar reminds us that a clever tongue-lash can be a defining symptom of uncompromising and idiosyncratic literary brilliance. "Great writers can be impatient, quirky, rudely iconoclastic literary critics," he says. "It is almost a professional deformity. They achieve greatness through a stern commitment to sharply individual visions of the world." . . . The likes of Eagleton and Naipaul may well be motivated by their "stern commitment" to truth. But in a society that relishes sensationalism, flippancy and, most of all, the vicious culling of tall poppies, I suspect that our funny negatives are too often motivated by laziness, egotism and commercial appeal. . . . Read the rest here: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/05/review.html.

Cooke, Mel. "Walcott Broadsides Naipaul." JAMAICA GLEANER May 26, 2008.

Derek Walcott landed a poetic broadside on Trinidadian novelist V.S. Naipaul as he ended his 'Chatterbox' stint at the 2008 Calabash International Literary Festival on Saturday afternoon at Jake's in Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth. The Nobel laureate for literature followed an onstage interview with Kwame Dawes with poetry from his upcoming collection, White Egrets, but a lot of the sting was in the tail as he closed with 'The Mongoose'. It was quickly made clear that the beast he was referring to did not run around in literal cane piece. . . . (Thanks for the link to Carl Wade.) Read the rest here: http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20080526/ent/.

Wilson, A. N. "V. S. Naipaul, Master and Monster." TLS May 21, 2008.

French, Patrick. The World is What It is: the Authorized Biography Of V. S. Naipaul. London: Picador, 2008. They met in Oxford – he an impoverished scholarship boy from Trinidad, she a girl from Birmingham. More than most writers of his generation, V. S. Naipaul’s great subjects and his life experience were inextricably linked from the beginning. Doubly cut loose, first from Asia and then from the Caribbean (his forebears had come to work as agricultural labourers in the West Indies), Naipaul chronicled better than anyone the central twentieth-century phenomenon: global deracination. His grand theme is that we have all come adrift. With his gifts of observation, intuition, insight, and his mesmeric prose style, he was born to be one of the great writers of our time. Yet few could have predicted it. And this makes his wife Pat’s belief in him all the more remarkable: that, in 1954, when he had published nothing, and seemed to have no prospects, she could write: “I have absolute faith in your ultimate ability to do something great. I am convinced that we are going to be a distinguished couple.”. . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3978845.ece.

Lelyveld, Joseph. "Looking for Naipaul." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS May 19, 2008.

Naipaul, V. S. A Writer's People: a Way of Looking and Feeling. New York: Knopf, 2008. Thirty-two years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to India for this paper to write about the collapse of its post-independence experiment in democracy. Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, had declared an emergency and suspended the constitution. Naipaul took this to be a major turning point, and possibly a salutary one, for a sick culture in need of shock therapy. One of his articles explored the notion that Indians experience the world in ways drastically different from those of most Westerners: that Indians were typically more self-absorbed, less observant, more instinctive; in other words, that they were ill-adapted, in their basic consciousness, to the modern world. "India: a Defect of Vision" is what he called that essay. Naipaul's latest volume is a set of variations and meditations on that theme. One of its chapters is called "Looking and Not Seeing: the Indian Way," but this time, in his characteristic preoccupation with what his subtitle terms "ways of looking and feeling," he journeys far beyond the subcontinent. A Writer's People is amazingly concise, as Naipaul can be, but also wide-ranging and tightly packed, a kind of literary Rubik's Cube, made up of small, exquisitely beveled pieces, with no obvious points of contact, that he manages to fit together effortlessly. At one moment, we go from Nehru's thoughts about Gandhi to the author's mother and her experience on her first visit to their ancestral village. A few pages later, we're into Flaubert and the embrace of concrete French realities that made possible the glorious, seemingly transparent second chapter of Madame Bovary, which then is contrasted to the overblown failure of Salammbo. By a natural progression that brings us to Polybius, only a couple of steps away from Virgil and, leaving the Aeneid aside, his poem "Moretum," which Naipaul celebrates for its grasp of the physical details of life in this world. Then we're back on the Gangetic Plain in 1925, observing the young Aldous Huxley observing Gandhi at a political gathering. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.powells.com/review/2008_05_19.

Tayler, Christopher. "The Mask that Eats the Face [More on Naipaul]." GUARDIAN April 5, 2008.

As Patrick French reminds his readers in this authorised biography, people have been trying to nail down the central paradox of VS Naipaul's writing for nearly 50 years. Profiling the author of A House for Mr Biswas (1961) in the Trinidad Guardian, Derek Walcott put it this way: "Naipaul seems, on first acquaintance, to have alienated himself from all the problems of our society and particularly those of his race. But the books are almost contradictions of the man." Karl Miller, assessing The Mimic Men (1967), described him as "someone with conservative leanings who none the less writes movingly about the poor and aspiring, a compassionate man who is also fastidious and severe". A reviewer of Naipaul's most recent novel, Magic Seeds (2004), noted his "characteristic mixture of tough-minded materialist analysis and atavistic horror". But perhaps Linton Kwesi Johnson's is now the majority view: "He's a living example of how art transcends the artist 'cos he talks a load of shit but still writes excellent books.". . . . Read the rest here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2270896,00.html.

Theroux, Paul. "New Biography Reveals the True Monster in V. S. Naipaul." TIMES April 6, 2008.

Ten years ago I published Sir Vidia’s Shadow, depicting V. S. Naipaul as a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain. He was then, and continued to be, an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons – none of which he pursued. Now comes Patrick French’s authorised biography of the man, The World Is What It Is, which makes all these points and many more. It seems that I didn’t know the half of all the horrors. When the lawyers were shown the type-script of my own book, they were all over me. “Look at this – ‘violent, unstable, depressive’ – Naipaul could prove malice!” And the trump card of the QC, with his lists of deletions and revisions: “Do you know what it will cost you if he sues you?” . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3688422.ece.

French, Patrick. "Leaving the Ghetto [on Naipaul]." NEW STATESMAN April 3, 2008.

When V. S. Naipaul published his slim, grumpy memoir A Writer's People late last year, assorted reviewers took the chance to denounce him. It was a familiar spectacle, the lion in winter having chunks torn from him by writers who would not have attacked him in his prime. In Naipaul's case, his determined self-construction during five decades in print was a provocation in itself: who was this Trinidadian man who lived as a knight of the shires and denounced multiculturalism as "multi-culti"? He said, or was said to have said, that Africa had no future, Islam was a calamity, France was fraudulent and interviewers were monkeys. How dare he support Hindu nationalism? If Zadie Smith - optimistic and presentable - was a white liberal's dream, Naipaul was the nightmare. For a successful immigrant writer to take the positions he did was seen as a special kind of treason, a betrayal of what should be a purely literary genius. "Great art, dreadful politics," complained Terry Eagleton. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newstatesman.com/200804030045.

Massie, Allan. "Living for Literature: Review of THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS by Patrick French." LITERARY REVIEW (April 2008).

French, Patrick. The World is What It is: the Authorized Biography Of V. S. Naipaul. London: Picador, 2008. The bare outline of the life is well known: the poor childhood in Trinidad, the influence of his father (a journalist and writer of short stories), the scholarship to Oxford, the depression and resentments from which he suffered, the early struggles and efforts to be published, the critical success of his first novels (a success not matched by their sales), and the blossoming of his reputation until we eventually arrive at Sir Vidia Naipaul, winner of pretty well every literary prize going, including the Nobel, and the most distinguished living writer of English. Success of this sort takes more than talent. It is also an act of will, and Naipaul's . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/massie_04_08.html.

Editorial Column: "A Grouse for Mr. Naipaul." STABROEK NEWS, October 30, 2007.

Perhaps the best explanation of this line of thinking comes elsewhere in the book from Naipaul himself, when he tells us that, "... I very early became aware of different ways of seeing because I came to the metropolis from very far. Another reason may be that I don't, properly speaking, have a past that is available to me, a past I can enter and consider; and I grieve for that lack." Naipaul supplied this lack with travel, he rescued himself from the clutches of 'island "culture"' by writing his way into the tradition of the English novel-with enviable grace and humour, it must be said. He presented the pathetic lives of these small people with simple destinies so powerfully that it has often become difficult to tell where his malevolence ends and our insecurities begin. Walcott chose a different, arguably more difficult way of seeing. He teased a past out of these provincial characters, housed them in something more than ruins of a colonial past. He considered them, and the cultures that had left them behind, synoptically, illuminating one literary tradition through his mastery of another. He created a past that all of us can enter and consider, one that allows us to reinterpret ourselves, and to come to terms with our legacies rather than simply escape them. For many West Indians that is an achievement that deserves more than a snide misreading from our other Nobel laureate. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56532163.

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. "Where Does He Come From [review of Naipaul's latest]?" LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS November 1, 2007

Many people have strong opinions about this Trinidadian expatriate, including the reviewers and interviewers he regularly deals with. The dividing line is essentially political, a fact that might be disquieting for a creative writer. In this respect Naipaul is more like Solzhenitsyn than, say, Joyce, whose appeal can transcend (or confound) traditional political divides. In the case of Naipaul, those on the left, especially defenders of the ‘Third World’ and its hopes, from C.L.R. James and Edward Said to Michael Gilsenan, more or less uniformly find him and his attitudes troubling and sometimes bigoted. He is portrayed as a self-hater and Uncle Tom, a product of the sorts of complex that Frantz Fanon diagnosed. On the other side are the conservative writers – those who might see Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a major intellectual figure – who celebrate Naipaul as an original voice, a writer who provides a searing, politically incorrect indictment of all that is wrong in the modern world: Islam in its various manifestations, the grotesque dictatorships of Africa, the squalor and self-inflicted misery of much of the Third World, the failure everywhere of projects of métissage between the West and non-West. A few fence-sitters meanwhile play down the significance of his non-fiction and praise his fiction, his pared-down style and capacity to write precise, economical, somewhat repetitive English. Naipaul is a prototype that has now been cloned many times over in the Indian subcontinent: the fiction writer who is also a travel writer. One can see why Pankaj Mishra may read and review Naipaul with an Oedipal frisson. Vatermord or ancestor worship? It can be a hard choice. Read the rest here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n21/subr01_.html.

Miller, Karl. "V. S. Naipaul among the Cannibals." TIMES October 3, 2007

Jealousy and spite in literary London served up with a brilliant simplicity of expression. . . . Another review of Naipaul's latest work here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2582572.ece. (Thanks to Rob Leyshon for the link.)

Jack, Ian. "A Way in the World." PROSPECT 139 October 2007

As Diana Athill, Naipaul's first editor, has written elsewhere, Naipaul was "a man raised in, and frightened by, a somewhat disorderly, inefficient and self-deceiving society, who therefore longed for order, clarity and competence." And so, according to Athill, he "overvalued a sense of history and respect for tradition, choosing to romanticise their results rather than to see the complex and far from admirable scenes with which they often coexist.'" . . . More here: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9807