(05/10/2008) Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents by Paul Theroux. Boston. 1998. Houghton Mifflin. keywords: Literature England Biography America Autobiography V. S.Naipaul. 358 pages. Jacket design by Michaela Sullivan. Jacket photograph by David Perry/Photonica. 0395907284. October 1998.
I doubt that Paul Theroux's story of the trajectory of his friendship with V. S. Naipaul would please Sir Vidia, but it is a remarkable tale nonetheless that reveals as much about Paul Theroux as it does about V. S. Naipaul.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
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, Paul Theroux met V. S. Naipaul - Vidia, as he was known. For thirty years both men remained in close touch, even when continents separated them. SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW is a double portrait of the writing life, but it is much more, for travel and reading and emotional ups and downs are also aspects of this friendship, which is powerful and enriching and often a comedy - and, ultimately, a bridge that is burned. The two writers' paths crossed in 1966 in Uganda, which Naipaul saw as a dangerous jungle and Theroux regarded as a benign home. Theroux became Naipaul's driver, interpreter, and apprentice - he was twenty-three and Naipaul thirty-four. Theroux was guided by the older writer, but as the years passed their positions were frequently reversed, as Naipaul sought Theroux's guidance and advice. They became each other's editors, confidants, and teachers. From Singapore to London, India to South America, the United States and back to Africa, the writers corresponded and crossed paths. Naipaul's brother, Shiva, is part of the story, and so is Margaret, Naipaul's Anglo-Argentine companion. A formidable and intensely private figure, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and is often cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize, Naipaul was close to few others except his first and second wives and Theroux himself. Naipaul was the first to read and champion Theroux's earliest efforts. Over time, they witnessed each other's SUCCCMCS and failures. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, mis is a very personal account of how one develops as a writer, how a friendship waxes and wanes between two men who have set themselves on the perilous journey of a writing life, and what constitutes the relationship of mentor and student. Told with Theroux's impeccable eye for place and setting and his novelistic instinct for character and incident, SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW recalls Nicholson Baker's U AND I: A TRUE STORY, Rainer Maria Rilke's classic LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET, and Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON, but it is nearly without precedent in anatomizing the nature of writing as well as the nature of friendship itself.
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