Half a Life - Softcover

S. Naipaul, V.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330485172 ISBN 13: 9780330485173

Publisher: Picador, 2002

Synopsis

In Half a Life we are introduced to the compelling figure of Willie Chandran. Springing from the unhappy union of a low-caste mother and a father constantly at odds with life, Willie is naively eager to find something that will place him both in and apart from the world. Drawn to England, and to the immigrant and bohemian communities of post-war London, it is only in his first experience of love that he finally senses the possibility of fulfilment.

In its humorous and sensitive vision of the half-lives quietly lived out at the centre of our world, V.S. Naipaul’s graceful novel brings its own unique illumination to essential aspects of our shared history.

‘The best novel I have read this year . . . the prose is crystalline and seductively so – you hardly realize that you are consuming a work of genius until you are plunged deep into a dramatic story which stretches across three continents’ Antonia Fraser, Irish Times

‘A small masterpiece and a potent distillation of the author’s work to date. Mr Naipaul endows his story with the heightened power of fable’ Michiko Kakatuni, New York Times

‘A brilliant, withering story of the bitter consequences of empire . . . Writing with a degree of wit and subtlety beyond the grasp of most writers, Naipaul has built a bleak world of discomfort and yearning from which, paradoxically, the reader will not want to escape’ Jeremy Poolman, Daily Mail

‘Parts are as sly and funny as anything Naipaul has written. Nobody who enjoys seeing English beautifully controlled should miss this novel’ John Carey, Sunday Times

About this title

Review:

Half a Life finds the veteran Booker Prize-winning novelist VS Naipaul on familiar territory, blending autobiography and fiction in an exploration of the "half lives" of individuals brought up in the English colonies and educated in the metropolitan centre.

Naipaul's protagonist is Willie Somerset Chandran, named after Somerset Maugham's encounter with Willie's father in the 1930s, whilst travelling "to get material for a novel about spirituality". Willie travels to England for his education, where he becomes "part of the special, passing bohemian-immigrant life of London of the late 1950s". Willie soon realises that his colonial background allows him to write short stories for well-meaning white liberals. Willie soon begins "to understand that he was free to present himself as he wished" and that he could "re-make himself and his past" through his writing. The effect is suffocating rather than liberating, and he marries a vaguely sketched "girl or young woman from an African country" who has read his one published book. Willie begins another "half life" in colonial Mozambique, where he soon tires of the domestic and sexual tedium of plantation life, and flees to Germany, mournfully reflecting that "I have been hiding for too long".

This is classic Naipaul, with its effortless dissection of the damaging personal consequences of post-war decolonisation, but its virtue seems it primary vice, as the novel feels like a conflation of several earlier Naipaul books, including The Mimic Men and the brilliant A Bend in the River. Consequently, some readers may well find that Half a Life reads more like half a novel. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

Eager to place himself both in and yet apart from the world, Willie Chandran is drawn to England and the immigrant community of post-war London but it is his first experience of love that may bring him the fulfilment he so desperately seeks. His wife Ana leads him to her homeland in Portuguese Africa whose inhabitants are living out the final days of colonialism. A moving and often very funny novel by the multi-award winning author who last year received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0330485172
• ISBN 13: 9780330485173
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240