Half a Life - Softcover

Naipaul, Sir V. S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 033052285X ISBN 13: 9780330522854

Publisher: Picador, 2011

Synopsis

Paperback. Pub Date :2011-4-1 Pages: 226 Publisher:. Macmillan VS Naipaul has often been accused of being ungenerous. especially in his scathing accounts of Third World countries Hisslim new novel tacitly poses the question of the worth ofgenerosity without clarity and purpose. Willie Chandran. thecentral figure here. is born in India in the 1930s. the son of abitter mixed caste marriage between a Brahmin and a backwardsperson. or untouchable. Willie learns as a child to despise hisfathers ineffectuality and his mothers coarseness. His fathersvague motive in marrying his mother had been to break out of theprovincial mold in which he was raised and to live out a life ofsacrifice. but too late he discovered that he retained all theprejudices of his caste and despised his wife. Going to London on ascholarship. Willie mixes in immigrant and bohemian circles. andeven publishes a ...

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:

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)

Brilliant . . . 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. (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 edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 033052285X
• ISBN 13: 9780330522854
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240