In several of his recent fictions, Paul Theroux has visibly mined his own experience for raw material, going so far as to provide the protagonist of My Other Life with his own name and curriculum vitae. Now, in Sir Vidia's Shadow, he casts a cold and cantankerous eye on his friendship with V.S. Naipaul. The two first met in Uganda in 1966, when the 23-year-old Theroux was teaching at the local university and trying, with only limited success, to transform himself into a writer. The arrival of Naipaul--at 34 already a world-class novelist, with A House for Mr. Biswas under his belt--was a signal event in Theroux's life: "I had been working in the dark, just groping, until I had met Vidia."

After being squired around Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda by the author, Naipaul returned to London. Their correspondence continued, and the relationship--in which Theroux was very much the junior partner and acolyte--deepened. During a holiday visit to London the next year, he realized that their rapport "was as strong as love. He was my friend, he had shown me what was good in my writing, he had drawn a line through anything that was false." And indeed, over the next three decades the two exchanged a steady stream of letters, visits, phone calls, and authorial confidences. Yet this most productive of literary friendships came to an abrupt end in 1996, when Naipaul--now knighted and recently remarried--burned a number of bridges and tossed his relationship with Theroux into the conflagration.

All of which brings us to Sir Vidia's Shadow, a peculiar mixture of autobiography, Boswellian chronicle, and poison-pen letter. In many ways, it's a fascinating and devilishly skilled performance. For starters, Theroux spent more time in his subject's company than Boswell ever spent in Johnson's, which gives his portrait a widescreen verisimilitude. He documents Naipaul's loony fastidiousness, his passion for language, "the laughter in his lungs like a loud kind of hydraulics," and the very sound of his typewriter (which, just for the record, goes chick-chick-chick). Theroux also gives a superb sense of how such literary apprenticeships can function to the mutual benefit of master and disciple--and how they can erode. By 1975, after all, Theroux had become the bestselling author of The Great Railway Bazaar, while Naipaul remained an under-remunerated critics' darling. Out of habit, Theroux stayed in the older man's shadow. Still, as the book progresses, it becomes harder and harder to tell precisely who's got the anxiety and who's got the influence.

It also becomes harder and harder to ignore Theroux's late-breaking animus toward his subject. His goal--stated not only in the book but in various tailgunning replies to his critics--was to write an accurate account of a long, rich friendship. "This narrative is not something that would be improved by the masks of fiction," he declares. "It needs only to be put in order. I am free of the constraint of alteration and fictionalizing." Yet every book has a tendency to break free of the author's intentions, and Sir Vidia's Shadow is no exception. For each reverent (and convincing) passage about his subject, there's another in which Theroux seems to be administering some deeply ambivalent payback. He contrasts Naipaul's sexless misogyny with his own erotic enthusiasm, and his own generosity with his hero's miserly behavior (although Naipaul's penny-pinching and check-dodging can make him strangely endearing--the Jack Benny of contemporary letters). At times Theroux seems determined to explore all seven types of ambiguity, which makes for both deliberate and not-so-deliberate hilarity. He also sounds uncannily like a spurned lover. And perhaps that residue of expired passion accounts for both the brilliance of Sir Vidia's Shadow and its disturbing, sometimes queasy pathos. --James Marcus


From Publishers Weekly
The subject of considerable attention well ahead of its publication date (which the publisher has now moved up), this frank and revealing study of two writers, longtime friends and mutual supporters, who finally come to a decisive parting of the ways, is sometimes sad, often funny and occasionally touching. Such is Theroux's apparently effortless recall of conversations, scenes and currents of feeling that it reads more like a novel with a particularly vivid central character than a memoir. That central character is of course the novelist V.S. Naipaul, seen here as brilliant, eccentric, irascible, often, it seems, purposefully outrageous. The two met in Africa in 1966 when Theroux was just beginning as a writer and Naipaul was already an acknowledged star. Theroux, who portrays himself as much more accommodating than Naipaul, puts himself in the background, delighted with each crumb of approbation from the master. There were many things Theroux found odd about his friend: his snobbishness, his apparent racism, his selfish willingness to let other people take care of his every need. (He recalls one especially costly meal with Naipaul, for which he paid, as usual, that left him without the fare home.) But it seems to have been Pat, Naipaul's long-suffering English wife, who finally came between them; Theroux, who confesses to having once pondered an affair with her, remained always an admirer of her decent stoicism, and wrote a touching tribute on her death. This was then seized upon by Naipaul's hastily married second wife (a Pakistani newspaper columnist who would seem, in her bumptiousness and careless writing, the antithesis of everything Naipaul cherished) to create a rift with Theroux. A last chance meeting in the street produced Naipaul's memorable line "Take it on the chin and move on," and the indefatigable Theroux had himself the theme for this vastly readable book. Is it fair to Sir Vidia? Impossible to be sure, but it is an enthralling examination of a seldom-treated subject, a thorny literary friendship. First serial to the New Yorker; author tour. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Noted travel writer/novelist on best friend V.S. Naipaul.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Kerr
...a memoir that feels less like a memoir than an onslaught of sticks and stones.


The Wall Street Journal, Cynthia Crossen
Mr. Theroux is frequently hypocritical, as when he extols a time when authors were mythical loners judged on the merits of their work rather than on their faces. But if anyone has defiled an author's work with an unflattering--and irrelevant--profile of the author himself, it is Mr. Theroux. His shock--shock--when Mr. Naipaul accepts a knighthood after years of deriding the institution only confirms that Mr. Theroux is obtuse about his subject. And his wounded amazement when his friendship with Mr. Naipaul ends proves that Mr. Theroux is no discerning judge of character.


The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
...in depicting his onetime friend as cold, mercenary and unforgiving, he has written a cold, mercenary and unforgiving book.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Richard Eder
Sir Vidia's Shadow is not pathography but something better and, disastrously, unnecessarily, worse. For most of its length it is a complicated but ultimately exhilarating portrait of its complicated subject. Theroux, whose acerb work has been helped and influenced by the acerb Naipaul, is a thorn bush writing about a thorn bush. The prickles fit together in complementary fashion, though, producing an odd semblance of velvet. Until the end, that is, when Theroux looses a lethal blast of defoliant. It is his own leaves that drop off.


From AudioFile
This volume is best appreciated by literary enthusiasts. For one thing, few besides bibliophiles will find interesting a memoirÐhowever fineÐabout novelist/travel writer Theroux's long intimacy with the celebrated novelist and political journalist V. S. Naipaul. For another, Birney's reading is dull. On the other hand, if you've ever enjoyed one of Naipaul's unflaggingly thought-provoking works and/or admired Theroux's authorial grace, you'll willingly endure Birney's lack of color. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
This is the book that has the literary world buzzing. In it, distinguished novelist Theroux paints a not particularly pleasant portrait of his former best friend, the even more distinguished novelist V. S. Naipaul. Theroux met Naipaul 30 years ago in Africa; the former was teaching in Uganda, and the latter came there as a visiting lecturer. They hung out together, and Naipaul nurtured Theroux as a fiction writer; however, Theroux realized from the outset that his mentor was not an easy personality to deal with--that he was, in fact, "absolutely the most difficult" person he had ever met. Still, their friendship persisted through long separations as, after each one left Africa, they followed other pursuits. Theroux insists that Naipaul "was . . . brilliant, and passionate in his convictions, and to be with him, as a friend or fellow writer, I had always to be at my best." Naipaul loomed large in Theroux's life ever after; he continued to believe in and support Theroux's writing, which, of course, was the most important role he could have played in the younger writer's life. But recently they had a falling out over what seems to have been a petty situation, and Theroux's account, in bringing the story up to date, ends on a sour note, leaving the reader to wonder why, if he knew Naipaul had a mean, nasty side, he was so surprised about Naipaul's behavior in this particular situation. Although their parting is predictable, the book reads like a good Theroux novel. Expect interest, since the prepublication publicity has been heavy. Brad Hooper


From Kirkus Reviews
The detailed story of a long, top-heavy friendship that took a sudden nosedive, from novelist and travel writer Theroux (Kowloon Tong, 1997, etc.). They met in Africa 30 years ago: Theroux was 23, a university lecturer and aspiring writer; V.S. Naipaul (Vidia) was only 34 and already a respected writer. Theroux was ready to please: ``He was stimulating and tiring to be with, like a brilliant demanding childneedy, exhausting, funny, often making a po-faced joke just to please me, and who was I?'' What is clearly a teacher-student relationship deepens into an ill-balanced if mutually advantageous friendship. Theroux needed encouragement to build confidence as a writer. Naipaul needed someone to buff is ego, nurse his ills, pay the lunch bill. This Theroux did, bearing Naipaul's dismissive manner, his mockery and imperiousness. Theroux put up with all this because he was awed by Naipaul's talent, because ``his talk was unexpected and original. He was contrary and he was often right.'' And perhaps Theroux was smitten, confused; he might like to believe that ``I could say what I wanted to him,'' but really ``you got nowhere arguing with Vidia. You needed to listen, to indulge him, not to debate every illogical point.'' One day, apparently out of the blue, Naipaul writes Theroux off. Baffled and hurt, Theroux is nevertheless now a grown-up who has felt pain before. He vents a little (Naipaul had ``stopped trying to please the reader. He lost his humor, he blunted his descriptive gift''), though not peevishly. It would be overmuch to say Theroux sighed with relief at the end; yet, undeniably, there is a sense of liberation. This friendship is no easy subject for portraitureoblique, intuitive, unspoken, irrational as it often is. Theroux does his best to explicate, filling this memoir with telling incidents, blending passion with dispassion, writing with elegance. As for Naipaul: ``Never give anyone a second chance.'' -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Boston Globe
"A compact, provocative gem of a novel."


Review
"Both unputdownable and utterly engaging."


Review
"Both unputdownable and utterly engaging."


Book Description
This heartfelt and revealing account of Paul Theroux's thirty-year friendship with the legendary V. S. Naipaul is an intimate record of a literary mentorship that traces the growth of both writers' careers and explores the unique effect each had on the other. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, this is a personal account of how one develops as a writer and how a friendship waxes and wanes between two men who have set themselves on the perilous journey of a writing life.


About the Author
Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1941 and published his first novel, Waldo in 1967. His subsequent novels include The Family Arsenal, Picture Palace, The Mosquito Coast, O-Zone, Millroy the Magician, My Secret History, My Other Life, and Kowloon Tong. His highly acclaimed travel books include Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and most recently, Fresh Air Fiend. The Mosquito Coast and Dr. Slaughter have both been made into successful films. He is the guest editor of The Best American Travel Writing (Houghton Mifflin, October 2001). Theroux is a frequent contributer to magazines including Talk and Men's Journal. He divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian Islands, where he is a professional beekeeper.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1Famous in KampalaIt 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. And you hardly know the oddness of life until you have lived a little. Then you get it. You are older, looking back. For a period you understand and can say, I see it al clearly. I remember everything. It can be a brief passage, for a revelation. Only a few days after Julian first met him, he realized that what he had taken to be a smile on the face of U. V. Pradesh was really a look of exquisite, almost martyrlike suffering. The man"s whole name, Urvash Vishnu Pradesh, was the slushiest Julian had ever heard, a saliva-making name like a cough drop that forced you to suck your cheeks and rinse your tongue with sudsy syllables. The fact that many people in Kampala had never heard of U. V. Pradesh made him more important in Julian"s eyes. He was said to be brilliant and diffi cult. He was smaller, more frenetic than any local Indian — the local Indians could be satirical, but they were sly. U. V. Pradesh"s face, tight with disapproval, gleamed in the Uganda heat. His hair was slick from his wearing a hat. Ugandan Indians didn"t wear hats, probably because Ugandan Africans sometimes did. U. V. Pradesh seldom smiled — he suffered a great deal, or at least he said he did. Life was torture, writing was hell, and he said he hated Africa. He was afraid. Much later he explained to Julian that he felt intimidated by "bush people." He had "a fear of being swallowed by the bush, a fear of people of the bush." New to Uganda, U. V. Pradesh looked at the place with his mouth turned down in disgust. From some things he said about African passions and his own restraint, Julian had a sense in him of smothered fires. Actually, U. V. Pradesh had reason to be afraid. The Kabaka of Buganda, Sir Edward Frederick Mutesa, whom Ugandans called King Freddy, was being threatened with overthrow and death by soldiers from the northern tribes. The mess came later, and was in turn buried by greater calamities that were much sadder and more violent even than U. V. Pradesh had predicted. "Listen to me, Julian." Julian did nothing but listen, and he wanted U. V. Pradesh to call him Jules, as his family and friends did. "Julian, this will go back to bush," U. V. Pradesh said, sometimes in a scolding way, sometimes as a curse. And that suffering grimace again. He walked in the slanting sun of Kampala, his shadow like a snare. "Al of it, back to bush." Sure of something, or pleased by the sound, he repeated the phrase, a verbal tic called bis. He was always sure, so his repetitions were frequent, a little chant and echo in his speech, still with the faintest singsong of the West Indies — U. V. Pradesh"s birthplace, the setting of many of his novels — lingering in the intonation. Julian started out knowing nothing, not any of this, not even what the initials U. V. stood for, and it was only long after that he understood. He was too young to look back, and knew only the terror of always having to look ahead at the looming darkness, and instead of reassurance seeing uncertainty and awful choices, or no choices, and risk, and doubt, feeling afraid. When Julian was young and he squinted at the big unreadable map of his life, even the magnificent light of Africa was no help. Yet he was hopeful. He felt he had what he wanted, and especially he had baraka, as they said in Swahili — good fortune, blessings. He was a teacher, but he spent most of his time writing. It did not matter to him that he was unknown in America. He was famous in Kampala. "Be grateful for what you have, Jules," his father had told him before he left home. "N o one owes you a thing." It was wise advice for someone going to an African country. Julian felt lucky every time something good came his way, and luckiest of all his first full year in Uganda — his third in Africa. He had a good job, a reliable car, and a well-shaded house. Uganda was the greenest place he had ever seen. He was in love with an African girl. She was nineteen and he was twenty-four. He was at work on a novel. His life had at last begun. The African girl, Yomo Adebajo, was Julian"s own height, nearly six feet, and slender, from a tall, stately tribe in Nigeria"s Western Region. Julian had been traveling there the year before. He invited her to East Africa and, just like that, she crossed Africa to join him. In Uganda, which was a hothouse of steamy gossip and expatriate scandals, their liaison was singled out — their not being married, their living together, their aloofness from others in Kampala, and the way she dressed. West Africans, rare in Uganda, were much more exotic than whites or Indians. Ugandan women wore skirts and dresses — "frocks" was their word — and Mother Hubbards, all drapes and frilly leg-of-mutton sleeves, oldfangled words for outdated fashions, designed by turn-of-the-century missionaries for the sake of modesty. Yomo stood out like a princess in a fable in her yellow and purple robes, her stiff brocade turban, and her sash that was woven with gilt thread. This young woman had the dark, drugged eyes and sculpted face you see in certain bewitching bronzes from her region of Nigeria. In poor provincial Uganda she was taken to be an Ethiopian or an Egyptian — "Nilotic," people said, believing her to be a visitor from the upper Nile, someone who, from her looks, might have arrived sitting upright, cross-legged, on a flying carpet. Ugandans goggled at Yomo — they were smaller and had to look up — as though she were from some nation of the master race of blacks that lived beyond the Mountains of the Moon. She just laughed at them and said, "These people in Uganda are so primitive." Yomo was even more sensual than she looked. When she and Julian made love, which was often and always by the light of candles, she howled eagerly in the ecstasy of sex like an addict injected, and her eyes rolled up in her skull and she stared, still howling, with big white eyes like a blind zombie that sees everything. Her howls and her thrashing body made the candle flames do a smoky dance. Afterwards, limp and sleepy, stupefied by sex, she draped over Julian like a snake and pleaded for a child. "Jules, give me a baby!" "Why do you want one?" "Because you are clever." "Who says?" "Everyone says." He was well known in Bundibugyo; people said hello to him in Gulu and West Nile; he was famous in Kampala. Part of the reason was that he wrote recklessly opinionated pieces in the local magazine Transition. He defended the Indians, he mocked the politicians, he insulted the tea planters and the sugar barons. A white planter wrote to the magazine and said he would hit this man Julian Lavalle if he saw him in the street. But the deeper reason for his fame in Kampala had nothing to do with his writing. It was the fact that he had been named in court, in a prominent divorce case, as the Corespondent, the delicate legal term for the outside party who fornicated in an adultery. He had been promised that nothing would be revealed, but the day after the case was heard, his name was published in the Uganda Argus. Everyone read it, and he was put down as a sneak and a rogue because the cuckold (called the Petitioner) was his best friend. Julian had not laid a hand on this man"s wife (called the Respondent), though the friend swore Julian had done so repeatedly, as detailed in paragraph 5 — "That on or about the 23rd day of August 1965 the said Respondent committed adultery with julian henri lavalle (hereinafter called Corespondent) at Kampala" — and paragraph 6: "That from the 23rd day of August 1965 the said Respondent has frequently committed adultery with the said Corespondent on dates and at addresses unknown to the Petitioner save that some were in Kampala, Uganda, as aforesaid." There were more lies: "That the Petitioner has not in any way condoned the said adultery." No, his best friend had said that if Julian wanted to make it true, and if this woman agreed, Julian could sleep with her al he wanted. And: "The Petitioner has not in any way been accessory to or connived at the said adultery." No, he had urged it, he had set it up, he had begged Julian to connive with him. And: "That this Petition is not presented or prosecuted in collusion with the Respondent or the said Corespondent." No, it was al collusion. A disturbing knock on Julian"s door one day was that of an Indian solicitor"s clerk, who handed over a prettily made-up document. It was signed and sealed. The official seal of Uganda showed a native shield with wavy and dancetté divisions between the gules tincture, full sun argent above a native drum argent, crossed spears behind the shield, with two creatures shown, the dexter supporter a gazelle rampant and the sinister supporter a crested crane rampant. The compartment ground beneath the full achievement was strewn with native flora, and below that, Uganda"s motto on a scroll: "For God and My Country." The document was a Summons to Enter Appearance at the High Court of Uganda, signed by E. A. Oteng, the Acting Deputy Chief Registrar. It contained a warning. If Julian failed to enter an appearance by a specified date, the plaintiff — the Petitioner, his conniving friend — could proceed with the suit, and the judgment would be rendered in his absence. "I wouldn"t ask just anyone to do this," his friend had said. "I asked you because I respect you more than anyone else I know." Then the friend promised that nothing about the divorce case would appear in the newspaper. The ruse would remain a secret. So Julian agreed, and the two friends concocted the story of an adulterous relationship in order to speed the divorce. The man wanted to remarry. The woman wanted to enter an ashram in southern India. Fornication was unlawful, but Julian was much more a lawbreaker for his lies — in Uganda, connivance in such a case w as a greater crime than adultery. "Isn"t this Mr. Lavalle a friend of yours?" the magistrate had asked. "Yes, my lord." "Some friend!" The following morning, Julian"s name was published in the Argus. The tiny print in the "Court Proceedings" might as well have been a headline. "These shenzi Africans let you down every time!" the friend said. Shenzi meant worthless. "I was a fool to trust those idiot typesetters on that shenzi paper!" So Julian became notorious. This wickedness fit the image he had of the writer. Writers then were not the frequent and genial faces they are now in this age of promotion, w hen they are involved in the selling and distribution of their books — reading before a small, solemn throng of people you might mistake for early Christians at your corner bookshop; chatting to the bland man with fish eyes and lacquered hair on morning television; bantering on the radio or late at night with an interviewer, who is the authentic celebrity and the real reason for the vulgar and overfamiliar encounter. Before this age of intense peddling, which is the selling of the author rather than the book, the writer was an obscure and somewhat mythical figure, inevitably a loner, the subject of whispers — an outlaw, an enigma, an exile. Writers were the more powerful for their remoteness and their silences; the name alone was the aura. In many cases, the author had no public face and all you knew was the work. Today the face is first, the book comes last. A writer then was gnomic, priestlike, a magician, not merely writing a book but making a world and creating a new language. This was when Julian was growing up, the fifties and early sixties. A writer was a hero. In Kampala Julian was an upstart, known for his American brashness in this African town. He had an inkling of his impudence and considered it and thought: I am alone. I am making my own life. He had the freedom to do anything he wanted, but he had limited means. He saw himself staying in Africa, going deeper into the bush as the years passed, and finally setting up house somewhere beyond the Mountains of the Moon with Yomo, his Nigerian. He knew just the place, at a clearing near the village of Bundibugyo, in the shadow of the steep Ruwenzoris, in the damp mossy shade and vitreous greenness of the Ituri Forest, among the Mbuti Pygmies and the Bwaamba people, a small settlement on the Congo border in the heart of Africa. He had made many visits there and loved it for its being unknown. The Verona Fathers at the Bundi mission just chuckled at the wilderness. They had long ago given up hope of a widespread conversion, and one priest in his mid-eighties working on a dictionary complained to Julian, reader confiding to reader, that the local Africans, Mbuti and Bwaamba alike, often contradicted each other on the definition or the precise pronunciation of a word. The language was uncertain. Ndongola was Creator — no, it was Gongora — wait a minute, it was Gangara. The old priest knew he would never fi nish histranslation of the Gospels. But it hardly mattered. The priests had been there so long they had fallen under the spell of the Bwaamba and gone bush in many of their habits. They even chattered and procrastinated like the Bwaamba and the Pygmies. At least one priest had produced some of the coffee-colored children who played near the rectory and who filled Julian with the desire to see his own dark children playing on that frontier. "These people are so primitive," Yomo said, with her deep Nigerian laugh and haughty heavy-lidded eyes that made her beautiful. But she said she would go with him. She imagined that she and Julian would be the only true humans there. She also said that she would go anywhere with him, and he loved her for that. This small wet valley behind the mountains, hemmed in by the vastness of the eastern Congo, was an ideal place in which to vanish. It was not on any map, and so it was for Julian to draw the map. As a writer he wanted that most of all, a world of his own, and he could make it himself, basing it on this almost blank and inaccessible place. It was not Bundibugyo, it was near Bundibugyo, and where was Bundibugyo? It suited Julian, trying to write, that he lived in a mostly illiterate republic. It did not matter that so few people could read. His secret was safe, the very act of writing was improbable, and he spoke to no one about it, because he had accomplished so little. He knew the worth of being famous in Kampala. Anyway, he was much better known for being a named adulterer than a published author. And Yomo, who knew the true story of the court case, found it a hilarious deception, of a Nigerian sort, and the better for there being no victim, except the law. Yomo slept late, her black nakedness starkly mummified in white sheets, calling out "Julian!" and demanding a kiss, and kissing him, howling into his mouth, demanding a baby. Then he left to teach. After a few classes, he walked up to the Senior Common Room in the main building and had coffee and read the papers. He had lunch at home with Yomo, and then a nap, and she plucked off his clothes and they made love: "Give me a baby!" In the late afternoon he picked up his mail, went to the Staff Club, and drank until Yomo came by to have a drink and tel him dinner was ready. The Ugandan men flirted with Yomo, but when they got too explicit she said, "Fock you," and they faded away. The country was thickly forested, full of browsing elephants and loping giraffes, with soft green hills and yellowing savannah scattered with flat-topped thorn trees. The lakes were large. Lake Victoria was an inland sea. Even Uganda"s crops were pretty, for there was nothing lusher than a hillside of tea bushes, jade-colored with fresh leaves. Coffee plants looked brilliant and festive when the berries were ripe. The cane fields were dense, and for a reason no one could explain, the road past them, on the way to Jinja, was always carpeted with white butterflies, so thick at times that cars had been known to skid when their wheels crossed them. There were hippos wherever there was water, and there were crocs in the White Nile. At Mubende a witch tree was particularly malevolent, but an offering of a snakeskin or feathers served as counter-magic. An old smoky-brown skull mounted in the roots of a banyan tree at Mityana was so ominous no one dared remove it. The nail driven into the skull was not an afterthought but rather the cause of death. A prince had carried out the execution, but a king had ordered it. Uganda was a country of kings with extravagant titles — the Kabaka of Buganda, the Omukama of Toro, the Omugabe of Ankole, the Kyabazinga of Busoga — and all of them lived in fragile and tumbledown palaces surrounded by stockade fences of sharpened bamboo stakes. Down the dusty roads Julian drove with Yomo, stopping in villages to talk to rural teachers. He was in the Extra-Mural Department, which required him to travel in remote parts of the country: in the north at Gulu, Lira, and Rhino Camp; in West Nile, where Yomo was taken to be a Sudanese; at Trans-Nzoia near Mount Elgon, a perfect volcano"s cone; to the border of Rwanda, where in the purple mist they saw a whole range of green-blue volcanoes. Uganda had been a protectorate, not a colony, and had known such insignificant white settlement that there was no resentment against whites, and none had been hoofed out of the country as they had elsewhere in Africa. Muzungus were a curiosity, not a threat. Ugandans were proud of their kings, who were superior to any European — they had been more than a match for explorers as ingenious as Burton and for al foreign politicians. The lesson for missionaries was Uganda"s notoriety in having produced many of Africa"s first Christian martyrs, when King Freddy"s grandfather, Mutesa I, burned thirty of them alive. But these deaths only excited religious activity, and Uganda"s martyrology served as an inspiration to the missionaries who stalked the bush. Indians were a separate category — muhindis, "Asians." People muttered about them, but perhaps no more than Indians muttered about themselves, for they were divided between Muslims and Hindus, and they made jokes about each other, revealing some sense of insecurity. Many Indians seemed genuinely liberated from caste consciousness. Africans envied and disliked them for their supposed wealth and cliquishness. Indians regarded Africans as weak, unreliable, and backward "Hubshees," which meant Ethiopians. Yet Indians also felt that Africans were unfairly privileged for their political independence, to which some Indians had contributed but from which they were excluded. Indians thought it was laughable that Westerners paid so much attention to Africans. Money given to Africans was money wasted. Indians and Africans were in constant contact, for Indians were shopkeepers and Africans were their customers. There were no marriages between the two groups. Each said the other smelled. They were all colonials, Indian and African alike. Just a few years earlier they had al been singing "God Save the Queen." Before each movie at the Odeon, on Kampala Road, there w as a full minute"s footage of the Union Jack flapping in a stiff wind and a trooping-the colors close-up of Queen Elizabeth on horseback, in a crimson tunic and black military beret. Now that was gone, though the memory was fresh. Some butcher shops labeled the poorer cuts "boys" meat" — the stuff bought for servants to eat — and the "cook boy" might be a gray-haired man of sixty or more, and the "garden boy" another grandfather. "The housegirl is hopeless," Yomo said. Yomo had the African monomania regarding diet. A country where pounded yam and palm wine were unobtainable was a Nigerian"s nightmare. She nagged on this subject effortlessly but with such passion that Julian was moved by how much she cared, how singleminded she could be on the subject of survival. She would be a good mother. "The girl never heard of kola nuts!" Yomo said. This housegirl was a married woman, thirty or so, with three kids whom Julian had allowed to play in the kitchen. Yomo exiled them to the back verandah. "You said you liked kids," Julian said. "I want one of my own," said Yomo. "Give me one." Two months of trying, at least twice a day, yet there was apparently no progress. Julian remained complacent. His luck so far had been wonderful. It seemed right to him to leave the matter of children to chance, as that priest on the Congo border had done. If Julian meddled or fretted, it would surely go wrong. Whatever happened would be right. He suggested that Yomo go to his Indian doctor, but she procrastinated. From her various oblique remarks, always referring to bush clinics in Yorubaland, Julian suspected that she was afraid of doctors. Yomo did not know what to make of his Indian friends, could not understand a word they said; nor could they understand the way she talked. But she was patient. She sat and smiled and afterwards she always said, "They are so oggly!" She also said that Indian men smelled of Indian food, and Indian women of coconut oil. The Indians in Uganda, despairing of India, loved living in East Africa — loved the weather, the mangoes, the empty roads, the greenery, and especially loved the parks where they promenaded every Sunday, airing their women and letting their children run. They put walls around their houses. The walls worked; the walls kept them private. There was profit everywhere, there was space. In many ways Uganda the republic resembled Uganda the British protectorate. Institutions worked well — the post office, the telegraph, the police, the railway trains, the ferries on Lake Victoria. One day when Julian was talking with Indians about India, one of them mentioned U. V. Pradesh. It was the first time Julian had heard the name. "You want to know the difference between East African Indians and the babus in India?" this man, Desai, said. "Read Mother India by U. V. Pradesh." No one knew what the initials stood for. The initials gave the name a blunt, impersonal sound, like a weighty name you might see lettered on the door — a large door that was closed — of someone in authority you were anxiously waiting to see: a dentist, a headmaster, an inspector, someone unfriendly, possibly intimidating. That was how the name seemed to Julian, unconsoling, and so far the name was everything. Whenever a book was recommended to Julian by someone whose intelligence he respected, he read it. Mother India was a book he took to immediately. He skipped to the portrait of the East African Indian, in the chapter "Degrees." This man was a liberated soul, a free spirit in Africa, but on a visit back to India he was lost, encumbered and bewildered by caste prejudice. Julian recognized the man, he trusted the book, and then he read the w hole thing from the beginning. It was skeptical, tender, comic, complex, and the narrative voice was never raised, never hectoring, always finding the connection and the paradox. The dialogue was beautifully chosen and always telling. Yet U. V. Pradesh was only a name. At one point he made a reference to "my companion," but that only confused the issue. "Companion" could not have been more ambiguous, and it also looked like deliberate concealment. "You are still reading that book, Jules!" Yomo made his name sound like "Jewels." She was stretched out on the couch, an odalisque, knees apart, touching herself, deliberately trying to shock him. "I like it, so I"m reading it slowly." "Come over here and bring your friend and give me a baby." She said no more than that, but the way she said it and stroked herself did shock him, and tempted him. He loved her for being able to speak directly to his body, and she seldom failed to get a hook into his guts. So life went on. Yomo waited for him to finish work and they were together the rest of the time. She laughed at the Ugandans for being primitive. They stared at her with bloodshot eyes. Julian wrote poems and worked on his novel and took George Orwel"s and U. V. Pradesh"s essays as his models for nonfiction. On weekends he gathered up Yomo and they headed into the bush. "Always the bush," she said. "I like the bush." Every morning he was in Kampala, he had coffee in the Senior Common Room. Al the lecturers and staff sat there in shorts and knee socks, like a lot of big boys, yakking. He read the Argus — now he was a peruser and student of the Court Proceedings. He drank coffee. He read his mail. In a country where telephones were rare and unreliable and no one phoned overseas, the arrival of the mail was an important event. One day, a man named Haji Hallsmith sat heavily on the sofa next to Julian in the Senior Common Room. The exertion was intended to call attention to himself. His proper name was Alan, but he had converted to Islam in order to marry a Punjabi. The young woman"s brothers had objected, given Hallsmith a severe beating, and spirited the woman away, and all that remained of the adventure was the religion and his nickname, though he had not gone on the haj. His face fattening with mockery, his eyes glassy, Hallsmith leaned towards Julian, who could see that he was drunk, could smell it too, the tang of waragi, banana gin. "What"s in that cup?" Julian said. Hallsmith laughed. He had probably been on a bender and was still drunk from the previous night, drinking coffee now to prepare himself for a class. He was a lecturer in the English Department. "Just coffee." "You"ve been drinking more than coffee," Julian said. "I think waragi, mingi sana." "So what?" Hallsmith said with a drunkard"s truculence. "Isn"t that against your religion?" "Drinking is sanctioned, except during prayers!" Hallsmith shouted. Perhaps from the effort of summoning the strength to speak, he belched and brought up a mouthful of air, more banana stink. "Do you know about U. V. Pradesh coming?" he asked. Julian said that he didn"t but that he was pleased. He was more excited than he let on, not merely because he had just read Mother India, but because he had never met such an esteemed writer, one of the powerful priestly figures whom he thought about al the time. The larger world was elsewhere, and the little town and university were seldom visited. Occasionally experts flew in — the Pygmy specialist, the cautious economist, the elderly architect, the agitated musicologist; never a poet, never a novelist. People from beyond Africa were welcome. The expatriates needed company, for they had no society. They needed visitors and witnesses to bring them news of the outer world, to listen to their stories — because the expatriates were sick of listening to each other, irritated more by the sameness of the stories than the lies and liberties in them — and most of al they needed strangers to measure them - selves against. "I"ve ordered Pradesh"s books," Haji said. "They"re in the bookshop. I"m planning a drinks party for him next week at my flat. He"s staying with me for a bit. Come and meet him." So Haji Hallsmith had appropriated U. V. Pradesh as his listener and witness. Haji also did some writing: confessional poems that embarrassed his friends. Yet they read them, always looking for clues to that brief, bewildering Muslim marriage. "What about my malaika?" Julian asked. It meant angel, and Hallsmith knew who he was talking about. "Your splendid malaika is always welcome, Jules." That same afternoon, Julian went to the bookshop and bought all the U. V. Pradesh titles it had in stock — The Part-Time Pundit, Calypso Road, and several others. While he read The Part-Time Pundit, Yomo read Calypso Road. She said, "These Trinidad people talk like Nigerians." "What do you mean?" She read, ""If you vex with she, give she a dose of licks, and by and by she come quick-quick when you bawl."" "That"s Nigerian?" "For sure." The character Pundit Ganesh Ramsumair, in The Part-Time Pundit, was unlike anyone Julian had ever met in fiction. The narrative, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, was simple and strong, unusual, funny, oblique, very sure of itself. It described a world Julian knew nothing about. Every name, every character, every setting was new, and yet it was familiar in its humanity. Among other things, it was about transformation. He read three more U. V. Pradesh books. They were also fantastical, assured narratives of transformation. He saw no literary influences, no antecedents. They were original and powerful, too plain to be brilliant, with a pitiless humor that gave them pathos. The voice of the narrator he recognized from Mother India: impartial, remorseless, almost cold. In his essay on Charles Dickens, Orwell had said you could see a human face behind al third-person narration, yet there was no face that Julian could discern here. About U. V. Pradesh personally Julian knew nothing beyond the fact that he had been born in the W est Indies, was educated in England, resided in London, had won a number of prizes, was about forty — nearly elderly, so Julian thought. The biographical note in the back of Pradesh"s books was short and unrevealing. Pradesh took no sides in these works of fiction. One, about an election, was plotty and sprawled improbably. Another, set in London, could have been written by an old, wise Englishman, and its observations about age and frailty gave it a morbid power. Calypso Road was slight but charming, ful of curious characters. They were all confident, fresh, spoke with the concision of poetry and with an originality that was like news to Julian. "So what you tink?" Yomo said. Reading made her impatient, lust corroded her English. She was tugging at his sleeve, pulling his hand between her legs. "I like this book." The extraordinary ending of The Part-Time Pundit, so unexpected and yet so logical a transformation, overwhelmed him. Why had he not seen it coming? It made him wish he had written it himself. The best of it was this: after all his changes of direction, the Trinidadian pundit Ganesh vanishes, only to reappear in London years later. The nameless narrator, now a grown man in London, looks "for a nigrescent face," sees the pundit from his island approaching him. "Ganesh?" he says in disbelief. The pundit seems utterly changed, wearing a tweed jacket and soft hat and corduroy trousers and sturdy shoes. He carries a walking stick and is marching through a railway terminal. "Pundit Ganesh?" the narrator repeats, seeing Ganesh Ramsumair. ""G. Ramsay Muir," he said, coldly,"" and the brown man scuttles away. "Why are you smiling?" Yomo asked. Julian was thinking, I"m going to meet the real man.Copyright © 1998 by Paul Theroux. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From the bestselling author of My Other Life and Kowloon Tong, the fascinating memoir of a friendship and mentorship that spanned 30 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 23 and Naipaul 34. 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 30 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

David Nicholson

Vigorous and evocative. . . The kind of story you force yourself to savor slowly though you're dying to find out what happens next. -- Washington Post Book World

Richard Eder

Exhilarating. . . A complex fabric, a tapestry. . . depicting the rich companionship of two difficult men. -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

James Bowman

. . .[W]riting this book. . . .was a bad decision, at least from a literary point of view. . . . Therous is not 'liberated' but cast into the intellectual prison of his own bitterness and hurt feelings, and an otherwise promising 'subject' is spoiled as a result. —National Review

Boston Globe

A compact, provocative gem of a novel.

Washington Post