Half a Life [Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

V S Naipaul (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 21, 2001

A powerful and compelling work of fiction from one of the world's greatest living writers Willy Chandran's father was a man at odds with the world - seeking greatness in the confining world that his class and caste dictated while political conflict in pre-Partition India rages around him. As a way of defying his heritage he decides to marry a woman of a lower caste but soon comes to loathe the very sight of her. From this unhappy union, Willy and his sister are born, both disdained by their father. It is from here that Half A Life takes off as we follow Willy Chandran's journey to escape his unhappy past and discover some kind of identity for himself. He travels to London where he is first exposed to the life of the immigrant in post war London - hanging around in dingy West End clubs and attempting fruitless sexual gratification. Through his writing he is drawn to the world of the BBC and of letters where he meets pompous publishers and men eager for sexual conquest. But residing deep within him is a sense of unease until he meets a girl from a Portuguese African colony and at last it seems he has found salvation.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Half a Life finds the veteran Booker and Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. 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 metropolitan cities.

Naipaul's protagonist is Willie Somerset Chandran, named after Somerset Maugham's encounter with Willie's father in the 1930s while traveling "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 realizes that his colonial background allows him to write short stories for well-meaning white liberals, and he begins "to understand that he was free to present himself as he wished" and that he could "remake 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 decolonization, but its virtue seems its 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, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

V.S. Naipaul has often been accused of being ungenerous, especially in his scathing accounts of Third World countries. His slim new novel tacitly poses the question of the worth of generosity without clarity and purpose. Willie Chandran, the central figure here, is born in India in the 1930s, the son of a bitter mixed caste marriage between a Brahmin and a "backwards" person, or untouchable. Willie learns as a child to despise his father's ineffectuality and his mother's coarseness. His father's vague motive in marrying his mother had been to break out of the provincial mold in which he was raised and to "live out a life of sacrifice," but too late he discovered that he retained all the prejudices of his caste and despised his wife. Going to London on a scholarship, Willie mixes in immigrant and bohemian circles, and even publishes a book. Naipaul's detached rendering of Willie's travails shows what happens to a young man who pieces his life together around the great, central dread of not being taken seriously the image of his father as an "idler" is always in his mind. Willie meets Ana, a woman of mixed African descent, when she writes him a fan letter about his novel. They become lovers. Willie goes back with Ana to her large outback estate in the "half and half" world of a Portuguese colony like Mozambique, where he remains for 18 years. Naipaul's plain narrative is studded with beautifully realized scenes, such as the London party at which a newspaper editor reads his own, self-written obituary, or the night Willie goes to an African brothel with Alvaro, an estate overseer. Although this novel does not aspire to the breadth of Naipaul's earlier fiction, it reminds us that his vision is on par with Conrad's or Graham Greene's. 40,000 first printing; 5-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Macmillan (September 21, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0333906497
• ISBN-13: 978-0333906491
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 4.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,287,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Whose Life is This? We need to talk., November 11, 2001

By 

James E. Carroll (Cape Cod, Massachusetts, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Half a Life (Hardcover)

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.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A wandering narrative of a displaced soul., October 17, 2001

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Half a Life (Hardcover)

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

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not the best of his output, March 4, 2002

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Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Half a Life (Hardcover)

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.