INTERVIEW WITH V.S.NAIPAUL FROM SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
AP photo of author at his Wiltshire home.
COULD I POSSIBLY stay to lunch? The invitation is unexpected and disconcerting. I'm not sure why. I have called the Naipauls to make arrangements. Lady Nadira Naipaul fixes the time. "Eleven o'clock. My husband wakes up about then." She extends the invitation and I hear myself backing off. "We'll see how it goes," is her parting shot.
Lady Naipaul's remark is germane. I have read that her husband, Nobel laureate, the author of at least 29 books and the scourge of Jane Austen, Henry James and E.M. Forster (to begin with), is famously difficult. His former editor at Deutsch revealed in her memoir that he could frighten people. I travel in trepidation.
The morning is bright and the Naipauls' home is a haven of peace. As I nose my car along the driveway of their secluded Wiltshire cottage, the crunch of gravel rips like grapeshot. Lady Naipaul, perched on a ladder, pruning branches, smiles at me warmly. The sky is blue.
I squint at a patch of it through the windowpanes in the sitting room. There, surrounded by alcoves of books, family photos and Japanese watercolours - impassive, looking gnomish - hovers the figure of Sir Vidia.
His eyes are perfect slits. They are hooded and sallow. He reaches an armchair. He sits with a sigh.
I had read that his back was bad. "No, no," he contradicts me. "It was a problem with nerves in my legs. They cured it with steroids but in a dangerous way, which exposed me to a virus. The viral fever really destroyed me. But I'm recovering."
Ample proof lies in Naipaul's latest book of essays, A Writer's People, which covers a range of his seminal figures - Seepersad Naipaul (his journalist father), Mahatma Gandhi, Gustave Flaubert and Anthony Powell - arcing back across Naipaul's life to his Trinidad childhood, becoming a scholarship boy at Oxford aged 18, then slipping fitfully and with great struggle into his writing.
Lady Naipaul's remark is germane. I have read that her husband, Nobel laureate, the author of at least 29 books and the scourge of Jane Austen, Henry James and E.M. Forster (to begin with), is famously difficult. His former editor at Deutsch revealed in her memoir that he could frighten people. I travel in trepidation.
The morning is bright and the Naipauls' home is a haven of peace. As I nose my car along the driveway of their secluded Wiltshire cottage, the crunch of gravel rips like grapeshot. Lady Naipaul, perched on a ladder, pruning branches, smiles at me warmly. The sky is blue.
I squint at a patch of it through the windowpanes in the sitting room. There, surrounded by alcoves of books, family photos and Japanese watercolours - impassive, looking gnomish - hovers the figure of Sir Vidia.
His eyes are perfect slits. They are hooded and sallow. He reaches an armchair. He sits with a sigh.
I had read that his back was bad. "No, no," he contradicts me. "It was a problem with nerves in my legs. They cured it with steroids but in a dangerous way, which exposed me to a virus. The viral fever really destroyed me. But I'm recovering."
Ample proof lies in Naipaul's latest book of essays, A Writer's People, which covers a range of his seminal figures - Seepersad Naipaul (his journalist father), Mahatma Gandhi, Gustave Flaubert and Anthony Powell - arcing back across Naipaul's life to his Trinidad childhood, becoming a scholarship boy at Oxford aged 18, then slipping fitfully and with great struggle into his writing.
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