The plot for the new novel by Hanif Kureishi is startlingly similar to the real-life meetings between VS Naipaul and his biographer Patrick French.
Hanif Kureishi Photo: DAVID HARTLEY/REX
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Hanif Kureishi’s new novel bears an uncanny resemblance to the story behind
Patrick French’s 2008 biography of Nobel Prize-winner VS
Naipaul.
The Last Word is due for release in February 2014. In a promotional
video released by publisher Faber and Faber, Kureishi gave an insight into the
novel’s plotline.
“It’s mostly about two men,” he said. “An older Indian writer, a man in his
early seventies and a younger man [in his] early thirties, a white Englishman,
who goes to write his biography”.
Kureishi elaborated: “Mahmoon is an older Indian writer, very very successful
who’s travelled, written novels and essays, plays and so on, and there’s a young
man, very nervous, who comes to confront him.
“Then there’s Mahmoon’s wife, a really extravagant, crazy Italian woman,
rather confined in the country but who is really good fun, and with whom our
hero Harry strikes up a real friendship”.
French, a British writer and historian, first visited Naipaul in 2001 to interview him for his authorised biography The World Is What It Is. The Nobel laureate spoke with unusual frankness about his marriage to his university girlfriend Pat, who died in 1996. He told French: “It could be said that I had killed her… I feel a little bit that way.”
French was also given complete access to the Naipaul archives at the University of Tulsa, including letters Pat wrote to him that he never read.
Naipaul did not ask for a single word of the biography to be changed.
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French, a British writer and historian, first visited Naipaul in 2001 to interview him for his authorised biography The World Is What It Is. The Nobel laureate spoke with unusual frankness about his marriage to his university girlfriend Pat, who died in 1996. He told French: “It could be said that I had killed her… I feel a little bit that way.”
French was also given complete access to the Naipaul archives at the University of Tulsa, including letters Pat wrote to him that he never read.
Naipaul did not ask for a single word of the biography to be changed.
More
