In this memoir, Theroux looks at his life through the lens of his 30-year friendship with fellow author V.S. (Vidia) Naipaul. The book is also one of Theroux’s travel writings and a treatise on what it means to be a writer. It is a book full of wonderful descriptions, scenes, thoughts, and meaning.
Throughout, Theroux describes an unmooring needed to observe and write, his mostly via travel and Naipaul’s due to lack of belonging to any particular culture. The artist Andrew Wyeth is an example of one who did not ever physically leave home, yet was deeply observant of life and the human experience. Wyeth did, though, unmoor himself from the artist father that he loved deeply, his work was a rejection and surpassing of his father’s work.

At its essence, this book is about that unmooring, the story of a son coming to terms with his relationship to his “father.”

The friendship began in Uganda when Theroux was a young man longing to be a writer. Naipaul believed in him, challenged him, demanded of him, and gave him what he needed to become the writer he became. Theroux doesn’t realize he has outgrown the relationship until Naipaul rejects him, and thereby frees him. And then Theroux writes this book, describing his journey in Vidia’s shadow, finally voicing his own reality.

Theroux closes with: “I was dazed, because I was liberated at last. I saw how the end of a friendship was the start of an understanding. He had made me his by choosing me; his rejection of me meant I was on my own, out of his shadow. He had freed me, he had opened my eyes. . . “

This book opened with the ending, as well: “It is a good thing that time is a light, because so much of life is mumbling shadows and the future is just silence and darkness. But time passes, time’s torch illuminates, it finds connections, it makes sense of confusion, it reveals the truth.” ( )

The fact that the author put up with the world's most famous curmudgeon for nearly 30 year is telling something. Paul Theroux treated Naipaul as a mentor of sorts, always living in his shadow, despite the fact that he always had to pick up the lunch and dinner tabs. After all this closeness, the bridge is finally burnt when Naipaul fails to even acknowledge the author's presence on a bright and sunny london day.

The fact that the author put up with the world's most famous curmudgeon for nearly 30 year is telling something. Paul Theroux treated Naipaul as a mentor of sorts, always living in his shadow, despite the fact that he always had to pick up the lunch and dinner tabs. After all this closeness, the bridge is finally burnt when Naipaul fails to even acknowledge the author's presence on a bright and sunny london day.

I doubt that Paul Theroux's story of the trajectory of his friendship with V.S. Naipaul would please Sir Vidia, but I found it a remarkable tale, perhaps more revealed about Paul Theroux than about V.S. Naipaul. ( )

A very nice hatchet job by Theroux on his former friend. I like the way Theroux writes. His books on travel have let me on many wonderful adventures. I found his fiction not as interesting for some reason although I did like his short stories. This book somehow falls between the thin line of memoir of a friendship and gossip. ( )