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Tuesday 2 December 2008

The World Is What It Is

A mask that eats the face

Sebastien Smee on Patrick French's biography of V.S. Naipaul

When Naipaul was writing his most ambitious non-fiction works, writes French, ‘there was no other writer of stature who was analysing societies in this detached, global way’. As his ambition surged in the 1970s, his sense of his special status grew stronger, a process that did not take place without self-reflection:

It may … be that one’s sense of dissolution has now spread [he wrote in his journal then], that there are no longer places where one can retreat; that I am now aware of a more general insecurity and, perhaps importantly, less of a colonial.

The insecurity may have spread and become ‘general’, but Naipaul remained determined never to lose his singularity. Unlike the Arabs in Africa he describes in A Bend in the River, cut off from the cultural authority of their homeland, he would not allow his own position in the world to be undermined. ‘The world is what it is,’ he wrote in the first lines of that book, providing French with the title of this biography; ‘men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.’

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