Book Description
From the best-selling author of My Other Life and Kowloon
Tong, the fascinating memoir of a friendship and mentorship
that spanned thirty years and five continents.
In this intimate portrait of his closest friendship, Paul
Theroux chronicles his life as a writer from the beginning,
when he was introduced to the literary world by the acclaimed
writer V.S. Naipaul. He first met Naipaul in Africa in 1966,
when Theroux was twenty-three and Naipaul thirty-four. Later
knighted by Queen Elizabeth and often cited as a contender
for the Nobel Prize, Naipaul was close to no one except his
first and second wives and Theroux himself. Vidia, as he was
known, was the first to read and champion Theroux's earliest
efforts. The two writers shared time in a country hotel in
Kenya, traveled through Rwanda, and corresponded regularly
when Naipaul lived in London and Theroux in Singapore. They
witnessed each other's successes and failures and became each
other's editors, confidants, and teachers.
Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are
revealing, strange, humorous, and melancholy, and thirty
years 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 for 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 and Rainer
Maria Rilke's classic Letters to a Young Poet.
