Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents - Softcover

Theroux, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014028110X ISBN 13: 9780140281101

Publisher: Penguin, 1999

Synopsis

This is an intimate portrait of a friendship, its beginning, middle and end. And it describes that rarest and most fragile of alliances, a literary friendship. One year before he published his first book in 1967, Paul Theroux met the acclaimed writer V S Naipaul - 'Vidia', as he was known. Initially Theroux was guided by the older writer, but as the years passed their positions were frequently reversed and they became each other's editors, confidants and teachers. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, strange, humorous, and melancholy, and thirty years of mutual history, this is a very personal account told with Theroux's impeccable eye for place and setting.

About this title

Review:

Paul Theroux first met V.S. Naipaul, or Vidia to his friends, in Uganda in 1966. Theroux was an unknown writer, while the older Naipaul had already established a name for himself as the author of such classic novels as A House for Mr. Biswas. Their unlikely subsequent friendship stretched for more than 30 years and spanned five continents, as Theroux grew in literary stature, with novels such as The Mosquito Coast and travelogues including Riding the Iron Rooster, and Naipaul went on to secure, among other plaudits, the 1971 Booker Prize for his extraordinary collection In a Free State.

But then, in 1997, their friendship ended. Snubbed by Naipaul following a chance meeting on a London street, Theroux immediately realised that "his rejection of me meant I was on my own. He had freed me, he had opened my eyes, he had given me a subject." The result was Sir Vidia's Shadow, a humorous but often elegiac account of the cantankerous Naipaul, which often reads as much as an account of Theroux's own rise to artistic maturity as a literary memoir of Naipaul. Some of the finest sections of the book deal with Theroux's contrasting experiences to Africa compared with the patrician attitude of Naipaul, and his emergence as a literary figure in London--with the help of Naipaul.

At times, Sir Vidia's Shadow offers hilarious insights into Naipaul's bizarre and often offensive musings on politics, race and sex, and his selfish and single-minded belief that writing is the only thing that really matters. This is a fascinating book, made all the more intriguing by the nagging feeling that a deeper level of recrimination lies behind Theroux's account than he actually concedes. If Naipaul's rejection of Theroux allows him to become just another "subject", then how much difference is there in the end between the two writers? In the end, is this really a book about killing the literary father? Only time, and perhaps Naipaul's response, will tell. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

"A compact, provocative gem of a novel." Boston Globe"Vigorous and evocative . . . the kind of story you force yourself to savor slowly though you're dying to find out what happens next." The Washington Post"Both unputdownable and utterly engaging."Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 014028110X
• ISBN 13: 9780140281101
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400