In 1993, Patricia Naipaul went to retrieve her husband's partial archive in the London warehouse where it was being kept. The material included all his earliest manuscripts, along with correspondence from the 1950s and '60s. The numbered box files, marked NAIPAUL, were missing. After investigation, it was learned that a purge of boxes marked NITRATE, after a South American company, had mistakenly included those of somewhat similar title.

"Always conscious of his own projected destiny," Patrick French writes of Naipaul's loss of a third of his past, "he had preserved everything." In explaining his sense of the accident, V. S. Naipaul outlined typically astringent standards for the credible biographical project.

"I am a great believer in the record," he said, "that the truth is wonderful and that any doctored truth is awful. I have great trouble reading other people's autobiographies because I feel it is doctored. So the stuff that was destroyed in the warehouse, lots of embarrassing things, that was part of the record."

Fifteen years later, Naipaul must surely be declaring the wonder of The World Is What It Is. French's biography of the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature isn't only superb. It is also replete with undoctored truths and embarrassing things. Enriched by complete access to both Naipaul's own (surviving) archive and the diaries kept by Patricia, who died of cancer in 1996, along with extensive interviews with the subject, the book is indeed close to the complete record.

It is, in effect, The Author Is What He Is, and in the case of the outrageous, impossible Sir Vidia Naipaul, that is a creature to behold.

Vidyadhar Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. His parents were the children of Indians driven by starvation to attempt three-month sea voyages in order to work as indentured labourers on island estates. Indians then comprised one-third of the island's population, and were thought by other inhabitants to be "poor, mean, rural, heathen, aggressive, ethnically exclusive and illiterate."

The Naipauls were different. Both sides were Brahmins, the scholar-priest caste. The father, Seepersad, was a reporter for a local paper who wrote short stories about his cloistered community. He named his first-born son after an Indian king. "It was a grand name," Naipaul said later. "I think great things were expected of me."

The intense boy known as Vido grew up internalizing those expectations, especially his father's thwarted literary ambitions. Naipaul fortunes remained modest – the large family had to squeeze into a clan commune in the Trinidadian capital Port of Spain – but their intellectual capacities were expansive.

Vido was neither the first nor last to win one of three annual scholarships to England. An uncle had done it years before; his brother Shiva would eventually follow in his footsteps. A sister won a scholarship to study in India. As such, Naipauls were part of what Jean-Paul Sartre called the "native elite," manufactured by the European overlords according to the colonial model.

At Oxford, the brown-skinned Indian from Trinidad was twice the outsider. He was profoundly unanchored, and as he wrote of a character in the novel Half a Life, had to learn the basics of social interactions all over again. He also came to realize that his past was a blank to the English. He was "free to present himself as he wished." Anonymity of this degree meant "the possibilities were dizzying."

For Naipaul, part of that presentation would involve an emphasis on "dignified Brahmism." It would also oblige a brutal separation from his inherited self as a colonial from an obscure island. French summarizes the process: "Ambitious, protean, made of smart material, deracinated by the accelerated politics of the end of empire, Vidia made a conscious choice to refashion himself."

The emergence of the phenomenon known as V. S. Naipaul took some years and several books, including his fresh early novel The Mystic Masseur and the story collection Miguel Street. Still, by the age of just 29, he was author of A House for Mr. Biswas, a novel that would "come to be seen as an epic of postcolonial literature," and was on his way home to report a book that would forever set him apart from the place that had birthed him.

The Middle Passage, published in 1962, declared Caribbean island culture to be barely redeemable. "Brutality is not the only difficulty," Naipaul wrote. "History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies." The desire to shock was real, as was the brilliance and perception of the prose. "Through the force of his tirade, or detonation," French remarks, "V. S. Naipaul was seeking a response."

So began the major rhythm of a remarkable career: novels and travel books of brilliance and perception, tirade and shock. French is an incisive reader, and his framings of the works themselves, often focusing on a few key aspects of their creation, stand alone as elegant essays on the artistic process. He also brings to the project a lofty but persuasively argued judgment of Naipaul as an essential voice, as well as a stylist of the highest quality.

But what of the man himself? If there is a single reason why The World Is What It Is will remain a landmark in literary biography for some time, it may be the almost perverse exceptionalism of its circumstance. In granting full access to his archives, and to his first wife's diaries, and to himself; in almost encouraging French to craft a narrative out of the often sordid details of his personal life and habits, Naipaul wills the book to a level of candour and intimacy appropriate to his self-regard.

To ask the obvious question – why would he do such a thing? – is to misunderstand Naipaul's sense of his own exceptional nature, and destiny. "I was not interested," he tells French at the outset, "and I remain completely indifferent to how people think of me, because I was serving this thing called literature."

A more interesting subtitle for the book would have been: A Great Author and His Suffering Women. French's compassionate attention to the life of Pat Naipaul is moving. The author's English wife, the result of an early, sexually arid marriage, suffered mostly for the truth that "Vidia's conception of himself was too fragile and narcissistic for his personality to be merged with another."

He was also mentally abusive, treating her more as secretary and maid than companion or lover. Her inability to produce children was still another source of grief.

Frequent visits to prostitutes eased his sexual frustration. In midlife, he also began a quarter-century-long affair with an Argentine named Margaret. "This was big, potent news for Vidia," French reports of the first of his lover's abortions, "not only was he good at sex, but he was fertile, able to father a child." His open relationship with Margaret – she travelled with him for years – left his wife broken. "I was liberated," Naipaul says. "She was destroyed. It was inevitable."

Equally inevitable, perhaps, was the sequence of events by which the mistress was finally sent packing (with cash settlement), the fatally ill Pat was dealt her final humiliation, and the current Lady Naipaul, Pakistani journalist Nadira Khannum Alvi, was installed.

Suffice to say that the sequence, if told as fiction, would merit accusations of improbability, including the blackly funny picture of the long-serving family maid, "shocked to the core," preparing food for the new bride.

Then there is the ending. Between Naipaul's own admission – "It could be said that I killed her. ... I feel a little bit that way" – and the final image of Nadira being sent into the English woods to scatter the ashes of the woman she has supplanted, while the author leans against his car, "tears streaming down his face," The World Is What It Is concludes on a note of vitality and strangeness that is likewise in keeping with its subject. What a wonder, indeed, is V. S. Naipaul.