Undoing their forefathers' failures...

...Colm Tóibín: how I killed my mother

Reading the letters between the father and the son, and coming suddenly on the stark news from home that the father has died and that it is now up to the son alone to write the books, gives us a sense of the origins of Naipaul's extraordinary industry and seriousness as a writer, the slow, careful rhythms of his prose, the painstaking care with which he constructs his sentences. These were luxuries not allowed to those who came before him. There were ghosts in the room when he worked.