Half A life by V. S. Naipaul
About the author
Over the several years during which he published his first novels , which offered comic and formally innovative portrayals of West Indian life, Naipaul reviewed books at The New Statesman. In 1961 he published the autobiographical A House for Mr. Biswas, his first major novel and the book that cemented his reputation as a writer of both realist conviction and superb wit. He returned to Trinidad the next year to write The Middle Passage, the first of his many travel books.
Further novels, such as The Mimic Men , In a Free State , Guerrillas , and A Bend in the River ,range across the world to consider the ongoing decolonization in the Caribbean and Africa. Naipaul also published several essay collections and memoirs; his last book was The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief. He was knighted by the Queen in 1989 and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.
About the book half a life
Half a Life is a 2001 novel by Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul published by Alfred A. Knopf. The novel is set in India, Africa and Europe (London, Berlin and Portugal). Half a Life was long listed for the Man Booker prize (2001).
Half a Life is a novel written by V.S. Naipaul in 2001. The novel revolves around the story of Willie Somerset Chandran, whose father is a Brahmin from the Hindu caste system and his mother a Dalit. Willie's middle name 'Somerset' comes from the name of an English writer called Somerset Maugham who had visited Willie's father in a temple once. Willie has a strained relationship with his father and decides to leave India so as to go and study in London, England. He lives the life of a poor immigrant whilst in London but later writes a book and manages to publish it. The publishing of his book leads to Willie receiving a letter from a fan called Ana, who admires the book and wants to meet Willie. Ana and Willie fall in love and Willie goes back with Ana to her homeland in Africa. The novel ends with Willie leaving his 18 year stay in Africa and going to live with his sister in Berlin.
The book was written by the author to explore the life of an immigrant living in London and how they come to adapt to their circumstances. The author also wanted to explore how this can lead to a prosperous future and even allow one to fall in love.
The novel was received well by critics and fans alike. In fact, The Observer commented that V.S. Naipaul is "without peer" and is a "fine...writer". The novel was also long listed for the Man Booker Prize.
Personal opinion
This is an unusual novel. There's no actual plot; instead, the story follows a man through his restless, aimless life. I know this doesn't sound very compelling, but it is--his desire for more--to figure out
where he belongs and what he should be doing to create meaning in his life--is crushing.
Half a Life, published a decade ago, is another one of Naipaul's spare, brooding tales that focuses on the lack of identity--cultural identity, really--that characterizes modern life. The novel begins with a kind of joke. Willie Chandran was so named for W. Somerset Maughm who once met Willie's confused father, a silent holy man in India. This brought Willie no luck, however. Maughm wrote about the father, but he never expressed interest in helping Willie, not even when Willie showed up in London.
The London Willie came to (sometime in the 50's, one imagines) was a kind of imperial beach, littered with the human artifacts that the British Empire had brought upon itself: Indians, people from the Caribbean, Africans, Canadians, and so forth. Everyone was half something, half something else.
As it happens, Willie has some luck writing for the BBC while pursuing studies at an unnamed college. He then squeezes a book of short stories out of himself, most of the stories fables set in imaginary kingdoms. One thinks, aha, like Maughm Willie will become a writer, and perhaps a successful one. But no, here Naipaul breaks off his own personal saga (he came to London from Trinidad and established himself as a writer from the get-go) and takes Willie on a kind of cultural/sexual saga wherein he experiments with whores, loose Brits looking for a fling with a man of color, and then a Portuguese-African, Ana, who in some ways saves him. They move to a Portuguese colony in Africa where her father left her an estate, and for eighteen years Willie accommodates himself to luxury in the bush, with occasional night rides into the dance halls of black Africans where his needs are explosively satisfied by very young women.
His life seems pointless. The lives around him also seem pointless. High points are the night rides and the weekend lunches at other estates, where the architectural grandeur (or pretension) is not matched by intrinsic human interest. (Sidenote: Having spent much of my life exposed to well-to-do ex-pats, I'm of the opinion that they're among the saddest of all human beings, ravenous to hear about the States but insistent that they know the States better, far better, than anyone who actually lives there.)
Then Willie meets a woman named Gracia, who is his instant soulmate although she's trapped in a marriage to a drunk estate manager. Well, there's a loping quality in a Naipaul in which "one day" these things happen; they just do. Two eyes meet two eyes and all four eyes explode with understanding.
But meanwhile the Portuguese-based regime is crumbling; black Africa is reclaiming its rightful place, and Gracia and Willia (and Ana) are pulled apart, unsure that any of them has really had a life, or perhaps even half a life, the book's title.
Oops, I gave the ending away, but this hardly matters. Naipaul excels in perfectly controlled, clearly focused, exotic studies of people and the cultural landscapes in which they dwell. That's what you read him for. This isn't Of Human Bondage, big and throbbing and heart-wrenching. No, Willie and other protagonists in Naipaul's books are written in minor keys. Their claims are acute but modest; they are trapped between and between, and that's what one reads Naipaul to experience...that ambiguity and ambivalence...that sense that among expats there are at least a few thoughtful, pained figures worth your time.
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