By V.S. Naipaul
In a story that strikes with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul has produced his most interesting novel up to now, a bleakly resonant examine of the fraudulent deals that make up an identity.
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste spouse, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness on the middle of his father's self-denial and vowing to reside extra authentically. That seek takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of Fifties London, to a facile and unsatisfying profession as a author, and eventually to a decaying Portugese colony in East Africa, the place he reveals a happiness he'll then be forced to betray. Brilliantly orchestrated, right now elegiac and devastating in its pix of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the top of Naipaul's profession.
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Additional info for Half a Life: A Novel
I might move round each Friday night to gather the lease. you could not get well humans than the men from Barbados. They have been very thankful. On these Friday evenings, simply off the London delivery shift, you will locate each guy Jack of them washed and fresh and kneeling down beside the mattress of their little rooms and praying. Bible on one aspect, open at Leviticus, hire e-book at the different part, closed over the notes. And the notes displaying. The outdated guy heard approximately me and made up our minds to shop for me out. i could not deny him. It was once his manor. He provided me the task within the membership. He promised me a bit of the enterprise. while I requested for the piece he acknowledged i used to be being uninteresting. I took the trace and acquired the school scholarship. yet he desires to be associates with me nonetheless, and it's greater for me to be associates with him. however it concerns me, Willie. He desires me to return to paintings for him. It concerns me. ” Willie concept, “How unusual town is! whilst I got here to seem for audio system' nook and observed Krishna Menon strolling and pondering out his speech concerning the Suez invasion, I by no means knew that the membership and Debenhams fragrance counter have been so shut on one aspect, and Percy's outdated manor, and the previous man's, so shut at the different part. ” * IT used to be AT a kind of bohemian events that Willie met a fattish younger guy with a beard who acknowledged he labored for the BBC. He edited or produced programmes for the various in another country prone. He was once new in his activity, and although in my opinion modest, used to be filled with the significance of what he did. He was once a bureaucrat at center, honouring conference, yet in tribute to his activity he felt he should still wear bohemian airs in a spot like Notting Hill, and to increase patronage to humans like Willie: lifting not likely humans up from the darkness to the respect of the airwaves. He stated to Willie, “You became an increasing number of attention-grabbing to me because the mins have ticked by way of. ” Willie have been operating difficult at his family members historical past. The manufacturer stated, “Over right here we do not comprehend a lot approximately your type of Christian neighborhood. So previous, so early. So remoted from the remainder of India, from what you assert. it might be interesting to listen to approximately it. Why do not you do a script approximately it for us? it is going to healthy well into one among our Commonwealth programmes. 5 mins. 600 and fifty phrases. consider it as a web page and a half a Penguin booklet. No polemics. 5 guineas if we use it. ” No one—leaving apart the scholarship people—had ever provided cash to Willie ahead of. And, virtually once the assumption, and the perspective, have been given to him by means of the manufacturer, the five-minute speak had sketched itself in his brain. The beginnings of the religion within the subcontinent rendered as relations tales (he must money issues up within the encyclopaedia); the sensation of separateness from the remainder of India; no precise wisdom of the opposite religions of India; the family's paintings, within the British time, as social reformers, humans of Christian judgment of right and wrong, champions of staff' rights (a tale or concerning the firebrand relation who wore a crimson shawl whilst he addressed public meetings); the writer's schooling at a undertaking tuition, and his discovery there of the strain among the outdated Christian neighborhood and the hot Christians, backwards, fresh converts, depressed humans, jam-packed with grievances; a tough event for the author yet after all a worthwhile one, resulting in an realizing and reputation not just of the recent Christians, but additionally of the bigger Indian global outdoor the Christian fold, the Indian global from which his ancestors had held aloof.