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This is an intimate portrait of friendship, it's beginning, middle,
and end. And it describes the 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 separted 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 writer's
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 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 successes and failures.
Built around
exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and
melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, this 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 constitues the
relationship of a mentor and student. Told with Theroux's impeccable
eye for place and settingand 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 neary without precedent in
anatomizing the nature of writing as well as the nature of friendship
itself. |
