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 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 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 constitutes the relationship of a
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. |
