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Half a Life

by V.S. Naipaul

Summary

HALF A LIFE, another of Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul's highly autobiographical novels, is about Willie Chandran, who leaves his Indian family behind as he finds success in England as a writer. The trouble is that this new, assimilated life begins to seem alien and incomplete. Like all of Naipaul's exiles, Willie finds himself torn between his past and his present, and uneasy about his status as an outsider in both worlds.

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Media Reviews

"HALF A LIFE is not one of Naipaul's major undertakings, but then I don't think it was meant to be. It is intended to give us yet another perspective on his corpus, in which one detail illuminates another....To understand the progression it represents, it must be related to Naipaul's own works, and situated in that particular imaginative universe."    -- Amit Chaudhuri

   -- Times Literary Supplement

"HALF A LIFE, the fierce new novel by V. S. Naipaul, the new Nobel laureate, is one of those rare books that stands as both a small masterpiece in its own right and as a potent distillation of the author's work to date....By elegantly compressing both the emotional arc of Willie's life and the social realities of his background, Mr. Naipaul endows his story with the heightened power of fable. With HALF A LIFE he has given us a powerful tale of one man's journey from childhood to middle age while at the same time creating a resonant parable about the convulsions of modern history...."    -- Michiko Kakutani

   -- New York Times

"The father's narrative is both the briefest and the freshest section of HALF A LIFE, written with a compressed eloquence for which understatement seems too weak a word. Still, anyone familiar with Naipaul's work will recognize the Chandrans' situation as a bitter echo of certain moments in his early comic fiction....[I]t is good to have [Naipaul] writing novels once more, the newest act in the career of a writer who has never quite repeated himself no matter how often he's relied on the same few songs."    -- Michael Gorra

   -- New York Times Book Review

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Random House Inc
Published date: 2001
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6 x 8.75 inches
Weight: 0.9 pounds
Pages: 211

Publisher's Notes

One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly un-
expected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago.

Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned
his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer—strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her—carried along, really—to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own.

In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man’s determined refusal of what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, Half a Life is an indelible feat of the imagination.

Other Editions

• Reinforced Hardcover Large Print - Center Point Pub (2002) - from $1.00
• Hardcover - Random House Inc (2001) - from $1.00
• Paperback Reprint - Random House Inc (2002) - from $2.00

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