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Search - Half a Life
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Half a Life Author: |
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Book Information
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Other Versions of this Book: Audio Cassette, Hardcover, Hardcover
Book Description:
In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul has produced his finest novel to date, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity.
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portugese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray. Brilliantly orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul's career.
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portugese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray. Brilliantly orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul's career.
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Top Member Book Reviews
Veeraraghavan S. (
6 member(s) found this review helpful.
You can tell the author is male.
At halfway point in the book, the hero runs off to another country with a woman, staying on her luxury estate in Africa for 20 years. It is not until the closing pages of the book that the author clarifies whether or not they married. Children (of this couple) are not mentioned, though there is a large estate to inherit. A woman would have provided these details.
The starting point of the book is very interesting - a high caste Hindu male tells his parents he has married a very low caste woman - this is done as a form of rebellion. They never really get married, which is why the details of their son's marriage are so important.
Mr. Naipaul has written a stripped down, depressive book full of existential angst. In real life, people set goals and challenges for themselves, and take please in meeting them. In this book, characters are tiny wisps of dust, whose lives are changed by momentary decisions or the threads of fate.
Spoiler: the last line leaves absolutely everything unresolved.
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