Customer Reviews

Half a Life: A Novel

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2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

A tenet of our civilization is that an education will prepare us to read, ponder and presumably enjoy the great writers of literature. And so, university diploma in hand, I reached out for Half A Life by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, V.S. Naipaul. Admittedly not having read anything previously by Naipaul, I was anxious to read this relatively short work. Alas, there is a lot to ponder but little to enjoy in this book.

It doesn't take the reader long to realize that Naipaul is a master writer. The prose is simple; his sentences crisp and short; the tale easily unfolds. The main character is Willie Somerset Chandron, and his life is the tale Naipaul tells. Early on in the book, Willie is described as "the mission-school student who had not completed his education, with no idea of what he wanted to do, except to get away from what he knew, and yet with very little idea of what lay outside what he knew..." And so, the book traces Willie's aimlessness and his search to find his place in life as he wanders from India to England to Africa.

Naipaul overlays many themes to explain Willie's lack of engagement in life: the Indian caste system, racial prejudices, youthful rebellion to name a few and explores them in unique ways. The combination of them is overwhelming to think about, let alone live through, and perhaps that was Naipaul's thesis in explaining why Willie couldn't fully engage.

This is a difficult book not to discuss with someone. I think members of book discussion clubs would like it very much for the number of issues raised and the life it describes. Anyone who reads this book will appreciate fine writing, even if they don't come away entertained.

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

The first half of Naipaul's much heralded HALF A LIFE makes a fine promise that this writer can spin delectable webs. Perhaps a familiarity with the atmosphere and history of both India and England makes the gradual growth of this story delicious. Then POW - we're off to Africa and for this reader the story becomes less important and less interesting, and yes, a bit preachy. I think the premise of this short novel is well drawn - that what we as individuals inherit genetically and sociologically and philosophically creates a destiny that need not be folllowed. There is much to be learned about the caste system of India, the concept of the class system in England, and the disintegration of race indentification in Africa: reading this book will certainly inform us of the sad state of affairs that retards our beliefs in equalization of all men. Maybe that is enough for a book to accomplish. But the characters mouthing these social blunders are less than fleshed out. With the exception of Willie, the main character, the rest of the cast is vaguely painted and doesn't carry our hearts the way this writer usually reveals. I'm not sure this is a good starting book for readers who want to know a Nobel Peace Prize recipient's work.

I was eager to read Naipaul's first novel in years even though the reviews were decidedly more polite than enthusiastic. Paul Theroux's review in the Independent was quite harsh but I attributed that to past bad blood.

This short novel tells the story of the first 41 years in the life of Willie Chandran. Willie is a Hindu Indian born of a Brahmin father and "backward" (untouchable) mother. This mixed marriage makes him an outsider in his native village. He is educated by Christian missionaries and goes to college in London. He writes a book of short stories while still a student. This slender book causes him to meet Ana, a mixed race Portuguese from Mozambique. Ana thinks she has found a soulmate in Willie; his writing has touched her so deeply. In actuality Willie has merely rewritten scenes remembered from old Hollywood movies. Willie sees in Ana a way to avoid returning to India or facing the reality of finishing school without a job to go to in London. Willie relocates to Ana's estate in Mozambique and settles into a quiet life. Ana has inherited the estate from her grandfather. Willie and Ana do little work; they attend parties and visit other settlers. Almost all of their friends are of mixed race. The pure white Portuguese settlers tend to stand aloof from those that are of mixed race, regardless of comparable wealth. Willie begins to go to brothels with an acquaintance, an estate manager from a nearby farm. He then begins an affair with Graca, the mixed race wife of another estate manager. In the background African rebels are fighting the Portuguese colonial government and, so slowly that is almost imperceptible, they take over...

The book left me with a curiously empty feeling. I never was able to empathize with the hero, Willie, or any of the other characters. It seems that the events in the book are an amalgamation of the author's experiences and of people and events he has observed in his travels. The tale of the conception of Willie's book of short stories could be a reworking of the authors own experience in creating Miguel Street, his first book, a jokey collection of short stories set among working-class and underclass East Indians in Trinidad. The description of Willie's father in later life seems to be taken from the middle of The Mystic Masseur, where the title character becomes a mystic and faith healer with his own ashram. The early part of his father's life reminds me of his description of lazy Indian bureaucrats he encountered in An Area of Darkness while trying to recover some confiscated bottles of liquor. The description of the strict hierarchy of social standing among mixed race and pure Portuguese settlers reminds me of his non-fiction travel narrative, The Middle Passage. In that book, Naipaul describes a visit to Martinique in 1962 (Martinique/Mozambique, get it) where the race consciousness is so pervasive that a blonde blue-eyed fair skinned person who is only 15/16 white would never dare to call himself anything other than "`colored." Scenes in Willie's life in Mozambique are reminiscent of A Bend in the River. Salim from that novel and Willie both go to dance hall brothels for anonymous sex with young African women. They both have torrid affairs with the wives of acquaintances. Both affairs end suddenly with African revolutionary violence going on in the background.

All these borrowings create a whole that is less than the sum of its parts. I must agree with Theroux who says in his review that it is unlikely that this book would have been published had it been written by an unknown author. Naipaul is certainly still capable of great things. The recent Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples is (to use Naipaul's own words as related by Theroux in Sir Vidia's Shadow) "frightfully good." His description of the forlorn fear-stricken lives of Iranians after twenty years of Islamic theocracy is especially superb. That book makes me judge Half a Life more harshly and makes me ask "what happened here?"

I didn't entirely understand this book. What I did understand, I liked, but I suspect that because it appears to be an autobiography, the layers of meaning in it are very personal for the author and therefore hard for the average reader (me) to get. I felt much of the book was about Willie's relationship with his father, who lived a [passionless] and emotionally starved life. Willie, in his neverending quest to distance himself from this "half life" of his father, ends up going almost to the other extreme. He finds a job that he is good at and a woman he loves, but in his obsession to NOT be his father, he is unfaithful to the woman he loves and lets his life's purpose peter out into a day-by-day existence that really only focuses on [passion]. Willie's father wasted his life in one way, and as it turns out, Willie wastes his life in another. I thought Naipaul's commentary on India was excellent, and that unlike most modern works Naipaul is not afraid to say that [passion], at times, is not the answer. I can't say that the book has entertainment value, but it stays with you, even after you've finished it with a feeling of disbelief, and because of that I recommend it to others. It is truly a unique book.

For a book that I didn't really like a lot, it was one I found very readable.

After the first 30 pages or so, which reminded me of Narayan's The Guide, I was next reminded of Naipaul's own A House for Mr. Biswas. There's a father-son element in these pages which is easy to relate to Naipaul's 2000 collection of letters between himself and his own father.

Perhaps the meanings that one senses early in the book are pretty much the ones that one ends with.

The book's not much of an advertisement for humanism. I imagine that Malcolm Muggeridge would have approved of this book for that reason as well as because its prose is so good. When I had finished Half a Life, I found myself thinking it should be compared to another book whose narrative ends in a remote, exotic, and, to the author, unappealing locale -- namely, Evelyn Waugh's famous novel, A Handful of Dust.

Naipaul convinces us that Willie Chandran, the protagonist/narrator, has had various sexual experiences, including, in his late thirties or at around forty, ones that give him more physical satisfaction than he had experienced before - - but that they are recognized as a dead end, so that even while Willie is preoccupied with them (his life has become idle), he tells us that a "half-feeling of the inanity of my life grew within me, and with it there came the beginning of respect for the religious outlawing of sexual extremes." That isn't something 99 out of a hundred modern novelists would tell you, and most of them wouldn't tell you that, I suppose, because they aren't smart enough and honest enough to do so. It doesn't seem that Naipaul falls for the line that, in a world ultimately meaningless, the best chance many of us have for an interesting life is a sexually varied one.

Willie can write, earlier, that he thought "how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence." That is something that, I believe, many modern writers believe or want to believe, but Naipaul doesn't leave it at that.

This spare novel of one man's journey through half of his life making decisions of convenience is impressive and erudite. Naipaul dips into the soul of Willie Chandran, whose father's own sense of impermanence imbues the son with the same tentativeness. Born a brahmin, the father chooses to marry out of his caste, in the spirit of Mahatma Ghandi. His mother is from the "backwards" class, as different from the father (and therefore repulsive) as possible. Between such opposites, Willie listens as both parents lament their unhappy reality.

Willie never appears to have a sense of himself, usually choosing the path of least resistance. When Willie leaves an undistinguished youth in India to pursue a degree in London, he takes his cultural cues from those who befriend him, their social groups, their sexual forays. With life-after-graduation looming, Willie meets a young woman who writes asking to meet him; she has an exotic Portugese-sounding name and has lived in the African bush. Intrigued, he marries her, borrows her life and moves to Africa with her. Once again his days become a patchwork of other people's adventures and friendships. Finally, Willie sees his pattern, disgusted by his inability to "be" himself. But Willie comes to understand that in the nature of life "everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on". And such a life is half a life.

I read this novel as the search for and acceptance of the essence of one's true identity. This is a quest upon which Naipaul himself, no doubt, embarked, after his birth in Trinidad, education in England at Oxford, and life in Africa. The challenge of his protagonist is, having been born a "backwards", to understand and accept his real essence as a human being. He tends to approach this existential task by entangling himself in the lives of other people only to find that their lives bring him no closer to the truth about himself. He discovers that he cannot to his own self be true simply by living the lives of others. The characters, setting and imagery in Half a Life are memorable and the narration enjoys a frankness that engenders respect. While this is a very fine work by V.S. Naipaul, it suffers somewhat by comparison to A House for Mr. Biswas, which is a truly brilliant novel. What does one do for an encore after one writes a real masterpiece? If you haven't read it yet, you may want to try it first. All the acclaim of Naipaul is justified: he can really write and Mr. Biswas is hands-down his finest work. I recommend that you go for Mr. Biswas and then, if you like it, circle back to worthy but somewhat less daunting works like Half a Life -- unless you prefer a toe-in-the-water approach with this Nobel Prize winner. One really can't go wrong with V.S. Naipaul except not to read him.

Having discovered V.S. Naipaul by reading A Bend In the River after spending a year in Central Africa some 20 years ago, and having read virtually all of his fictional works, or at least the ones he calls fiction, I was delighted that simultaneously he finally won the Nobel Prize and had a new book coming out.

It is an exceedingly interesting and powerful work that presses the idea of identity from cross cultural encounters in a way that it is both unique and affecting.

Seeing the humanity, social position, reception and morality of his characters all at once makes it possible for him to pose the position of their identity, their "half lives" in ways that leaves one speechless. Indeed, at the end, one is not sure who is every leading his or her own life or even half of one.

There are several ways in which Naipaul's novel plays upon the ambiguity of its title, "Half a Life". In the most obvious sense, the book tells the story of "half a life" because it covers the life of its protagonist, Willie Somerset Chandran, up to the age of 41. (Slightly more than half the human lifespan of threescore and ten). At the end of the book, the reader is left to wonder about the manner in which Willie's subsequent life will develop from the story we are told in the novel.

In another sense, the novel tells the story of "half a life" in terms of quality rather than quantity (length of life). Willie leads only half a fully-developed human life in the book because of his frustration, for sexual as well as other reasons, and lack of purpose. As Willie comes to realize, the reader comes to realize the rather empty character of Willie's life.

Perhaps another sense in which the novel tells the story of "half a life" is that the author does not tell us Willie's full story. We learn about his frustrated ambitions, his family, his travels, and something of his sexuality. The book seems to suggest that there is more to the character, both within him and without him, than the author tells us.

A final sense in which the book tells of "half a life" lies in its autobiographical character. The book seems to be based in part on Naipaul's own life. But it does so by taking details from an actual lived life and scrambling them up and changing them through imagination, just in the way that Willie in the novel uses movie plots to create his volume of short stories. For example in the book Willie is born in India, goes to college in England as a scholarship student, and then lives in Mozambique. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, went to England as a scholarship student, and has written much about India.

All these possible meanings to the term "half a life" focus on Willie's lack of self-knowledge and his difficulty in attaining it. Willie seems the constant outsider. He is never comfortable with himself of where he is. He has no real plan or purpose for himself. In the book, he learns that he is a writer of promise and produces a good first volume of short stories. But he doesn't follow-up and leads a drifting life in Mozambique for 18 years. Equally important, Willie is sexually frustrated and, as he stresses, sexually ignorant. Willie's sexual frustration has its beginning in the India of his boyhood and in the unhappy relationship between his parents. It continues through his college years in London where he has sexual relationships with his friends' girlfriends and with prostitutes. And in Mozambique he continues his relationships with young African prostitutes and with the wives of acquaintances.

The story is for the most part astringently told. The book is in three large sections which describe Willie's life in India, his life as a student in London, and his years in Mozambique. I was greatly drawn into the first two parts of the book, particularly the middle section describing Willie's student days in London. The third lengthy section describing Willie's life in Mozambique in the final years of colonial rule falls off, alas, markedly.

This is a very tough-minded book about its protagonist's inability to come to terms with himself, to find a goal in life he can pursue and a full human sexual relationship. It suggests the many ways in which people are limited, through their own choices or through their circumstances, to living "half a life".