World Is What It Is, The(ISBN=9781400079803)

　　The first major biography of V.S. Naipaul, the controversial and enigmatic Nobel laureate: a stunning writer whose only stated ambition was greatness, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred.
　 　Beginning in rich detail in Trinidad, where Naipaul was born into an Indian family, Patrick French skillfully examines Naipaul’s life within a displaced community and his fierce ambition at school. He describes how, on scholarship at Oxford, homesickness and depression struck with great force; the ways in which Naipaul’s first wife helped him to cope and their otherwise fraught marriage; and Naipaul’s struggles throughout subsequent uncertainties in England, including his twenty-five-year-long affair.
　 　Naipaul’s extraordinary gift—producing, uniquely, masterpieces of both fiction and nonfiction—is most of all born of a forceful, visionary impulse, whose roots French traces with a sympathetic brilliance and devastating insight.

　　PATRICK FRENCH was born in England in 1966 and studied literature at Edinburgh University. He is the author of Younghusband, Liberty or Death and Tibet, Tibet, and is a winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. The World Is What It Is won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hawthornden Prize.

Introduction ix
PART ONE
ONE TheNewWorld
TWO In the Lion House
THREE“Like Oliver Twist in the Workhouse”
FOUR To the Mother Country
FIVE‘29e Portu Hispaniensi in Trinitatis Insula”
SIX“I Love You，My Dear Pat
SEVENTo the Empty House
EIGH7“They Want Me to Know My Place”
NINE“Something Rich Like Chocolate”
TEN Back to the New wrld
ELEVEN“He Asked for IO Gns!!”
TwELvE  “There Wasn，t Any Kind Remark
PART Tw0
THIRTEEN The Homecoming
FOURTEEN“Lovely Vogue，just Bought"
FIFTEEN．The Schintsky Method
SIXTEEN The World
SEVENTEEN“with the Aid of a Cutlass Blade”
EIGHTEEN Margarita
NINETEEN England and Argentina
……