Product Description

In a corner of India untouched by anti-colonial agitation Willy Chandran's father stood at odds with the world - aspiring to greatness whilst living out the dreary life marked out for him by his ancestors. In an attempt to defy his past, he marries a low-caste woman only to find himself at the mercy of his own fury.

From this unhappy union the utterly compelling character of Willy Chandran emerges, oddly like his father, naively eager to find something that will place him both in and apart from the world. He is drawn to England and the immigrant community of post war London, its dingy West End clubs, and sexual encounters, and even to the eccentric milieu of the English writer.

But it is Willy's first experience of love that might bring him the fulfillment he so desperately seeks. His wife Ana leads him to her home, a province of Portuguese Africa, a country whose inhabitants are all uncertainly living out the last days of colonialism. Naipaul delineates the relationship between father and son with wonderful clarity and compassion; the comic brilliance of the London scenes and the penetrating descriptions of Africa are hard to beat.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #474026 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 300 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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

About the Author
V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He is the author of more than fourteen works of fiction, including A House for Mr Biswas and A Bend in the River, and ten works of non-fiction including An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization. He has won every major literary award bar the Nobel. He lives in Wiltshire.

Customer Reviews

A wandering narrative of a displaced soul.
Naipaul's Nobel Prize for Literature celebrates the long and illustrious career of a writer of extraordinary narrative gifts, amply demonstrated in this novel. The reader can choose any page of the book at random and be stunned by a graceful turn of phrase, a unique observation, the pleasing alternation of starkly simple and elegantly complex sentences, or a perceptive comment presented with grace. Though it is relatively short, it is dense in its thematic development, tracing the peripatetic life of Willie Somerset Chandran across three continents, and from his teen years to his early 40's, as he attempts to fit in, to be part of some mainstream.

The offspring of a Brahmin functionary in a maharajah's court and an Untouchable woman, someone to whom his father was drawn temporarily in an effort to emulate the sacrifice of Gandhi, Willie belongs to neither group, an outsider even to the lowest caste. He escapes to England, where he remains an outsider, for his schooling and an early career as a writer, eventually fleeing again with Ana, a Portuguese-African woman, to her farm in Mozambique, where he lives for eighteen years. These are eighteen years in which he remains alienated, however, living half a life in a half-developed country to which he, apparently, is only half-committed.

The political and racial tensions of the novel--the bloody independence movement in India, the Notting Hill race riots in London, and the guerrilla movement for independence in Mozambique--are vivid and dramatic, paralleling Willie's personal conflicts. His early sexual encounters, which might have brought him some sense of belonging, are unfulfilling, however, laden with racial overtones and additional tensions, and described by Naipaul in startingly passionless and unerotic prose. And while the novel has a good deal of irony and some satire, it has no sense of lighthearted fun. Willie's need to belong is so intense it overpowers everything else. Though the reader may feel sympathy for him, his self-centeredness and lack of feeling for other alienated people, especially Ana, ultimately keep him at a distance him from everyone, including this reader.

Because Naipaul has mined the theme of displacement repeatedly in his novels and non-fiction, one cannot avoid wondering how much of this book is autobiographical. Though that probably shouldn't matter, it is a distraction here. The book feels more like the nonfictional summing-up of a life, in which the reader is an objective observer, than a liberating fictional journey into a new world which the reader shares equally with the author. Mary Whipple

Not Half!
....This is my first book by Naipaul. Having heard much about his writing, I was intrigued by the title of his latest work. Picking up a copy at London's Waterloo station, I was captivated from the moment I turned the first page. Naipaul's command of the English language makes this book a lucid and flowing pleasure to read.

What separates this book from many others I have read in the past by other authors is the way Naipaul describes the events which transpire during the lives of the various characters portrayed in the book through their very own eyes. You read in to the minds and thoughts of the main characters as if they've sat you down on a sofa and started telling you their personal life story.

The book manages to merge three distinct stories in to one, blurring the boundaries between each and providing a fitting link between the parts. As you move from one chapter to another, you can carry over the emotions and feelings slowly being built up by the main characters and connect with the despair and futility of life which they put across as you continue to read.

This story is not one to read if you're looking for laughs, but you may well find yourself oddly grinning as you interpret the awkward moments put across as you progress through the pages. Naipaul captures the ideal and also short comings of society in an exemplary way, though reframes from being antiseptically descriptive to the point of clean fact. You realise that this is indeed a story of fiction, not necessary fact.

The book had me turning pages to the very end and left me in one of those moods where I just said out loud, "damn" after reading the very last sustenance at the end of the book. It almost sets the scene for Half a Life 2, but why bother improving or extending a story which has already proven its point and peaked the imagination.....

Highly recommended if you're a first time reader of Naipaul's work. I certainly enjoyed it.

Naipaul at his best!
This book really is Naipaul at his best, back to the style of his earlier books with much in common with A House for Mr Biswas and The Mystic Masseur. It is a commic and touching book with Naipauls characteristicly beautiful use of language. Strongly reccomended for fans and as an itroduction to Naipaul. A Great book