As sly and funny as anything Naipaul has written . . . He is still mining his richest obsessions . . . The classic that his new novel calls to mind is Voltaire's Candide. There is the same mocking simplicity of style, the same heartless elegance of design . . . Nobody who enjoys seeing English beautifully controlled should miss this novel.
A surprise and a pleasure . . . here, at last, is a work of pure imagination, though the themes are characteristic in their complex peculiarity . . . Naipaul has produced the most complex and demanding body of work of any post-war British writer . . . In sentences of great precision and balance, Naipaul reanimates the dilemmas of the late and post-colonial experience . . . He reminds us again of what a fine and unusual writer he is . . . In the canon of contemporary British writing he is without peer: a cold, clear-eyed prophet, a scourge of sentimentality, irrationalism and lazy left-liberal prejudices. Read him.
Naipaul writes a prose as clean as a stripped wand, but however plain the language, the ideas it delivers are not. . . . He is still peerless as a deviser of the shocking icon. He builds a scene of metaphysical loss as compelling as any Renaissance canvas of the expulsion from paradise.
No writer has written more tellingly about the vocation of writing than V. S. Naipaul. . . . this new novel, Half a Life, shows us that Naipaul's absorption in how he came to be a writer is still fresh. . . . The pages about London glow, and bear comparison with anything that Naipaul has done . . . Almost casually, but beautifully, achieved . . . Captures in miniature the exceptional trajectory of Naipaul's oeuvre-the figure of the father, the life of the writer, and, finally, an enquiry into the origins of the colonial landscape itself.
The foremost literary interpreter of the third world for a British and American readership.
Genuinely powerful in a deeply politically incorrect way.
Fresh . . . A novel with a purpose . . . Through the evocation of three continents and several decades, without calling on public events and purely through the narrative of a life, V. S. Naipaul gives us a moral tale which captures the evanescence of our times.
Read it for its beautifully controlled English.
One of the world's greatest living novelists . . . A writer whose world-view has been characterised by rigorous inquiry . . . A fascinating study . . . Naipaul has thankfully lost none of his grace, style, or storytelling power in this beautiful novel.
Like a series of musical variations, the novel that follows [the first lines] never departs from them essence . . . This is brilliant, affecting stuff: the novel's melancholy drama is played out on the furthest margins of fiction, where things are recollected rather than observed.
Nearly 150 years ago, Ivan Goncharov crafted a jewel in the crown of the Russian novel, the astonishing Oblomov. Astonishing because, like a more profound and prolix Seinfeld script, the novel was about almost nothing. Or rather, it charted its titular hero's quest for nothingnesshe spends the book's pages fretting about whether to get out of bed in the morning. Willie Chandram, the protagonist of V.S. Naipaul's thirteenth novel, could be Oblomov's twenty-first-century psychic kin. Journalist, traveler, exile, Willie is busier than the Russian, but if Goncharov's memorable creation is a titan of torpor, an indolent puppeteer who's let the strings of his spirit go slack, Willie is an Odysseus of aimlessness, terminally, perhaps even willfully, adrift.
In-depth studies of subtle wonders or disorders, rarefied states of mind or being, are tricky to pull offyet can be priceless. With Half a Life, Naipaul makes masterful fiction of the story of a sad, unsung yet representative figurethe man who never quite "gets it," slave to an unclear destiny, a soul who can't seem to claim his own life as his.
At sixty-nine, after a forty-year career, Naipaul is a preeminent literary voice. In such novels as A House for Mr. Biswas and A Bend in the River and eleven volumes of nonfiction (Among the Believers, India: A Million Mutinies Now), he's become one of the brightest stars among postcolonial writers. A longtime resident of England born in Trinidad to an Indian family, Naipaul excels at rendering the clashes of the Third and First Worldsbetween, for example, Islamic fundamentalism and theEnlightenment cult of progress that remains the West's intellectual credo. Prisoners either of shopworn tradition or disillusioned victims of soured revolts, the men and women he writes about are helpless.
In lucid prose, Naipaul has long lifted the veil on the Caribbean, Iran and South America while himself retaining poignant faith in a central Western tenet, "the idea of the pursuit of happiness," which he celebrated in a 1999 New York Times editorial. Adhering to this ideal and casting a cold eye on Third World boosterism has earned Naipaul some vilification (he's a traitor to his kind!), yet he persevereshis secret-sharing reportage on multifarious "hearts of darkness" reaping comparisons to Joseph Conrad.
For Willie Chandram, the pursuit of happiness is bollixed from the start. From his father, he inherits a fatal passivity. The novel begins brilliantly, with W. Somerset Maugham mistakenly taking the elder Chandram as a model for the Wisdom of the East in The Razor's Edge. A mendicant who confesses that "I foolishly gave up English education in response to the mahatma's call, and unfitted myself for life," Willie's father only looks like a sage; after the success of Maugham's bestseller, he locks himself into pretending the self-sacrificing life of one. But resentment is his keynote; for actual gurus, a vow of silence is a spiritual toolChandram senior often chooses silence too, but passive aggressiveness motivates his vow.
A martyr to his father's marriagethe old man had wed a lower-caste woman out of condescending pityWillie flees his unhappy childhood. In bohemian England of the 1950s, not only does he exaggerate the Indian "exoticism" that embarrasses him, but he whores his heritage by writing radio scripts for the BBC on Third World subjects. He tries, too, to write genuine stories about his Indian childhood, but then sabotages them by ripping off plots from Hollywood films. He also, fumblingly, wretchedly, seeks love. Basically, he's desperate: "All that he had now was an ideait was like a belief in magicthat one day something would happen, an illumination would come to him, and he would be taken by a set of events to the place he should go."
Events indeed conspire, and he finds himself in Africa. On arrival, no more certain of himself than before, he resolves, "I must not unpack. I must never behave as though I'm staying," but he stays for eighteen years. He's fallen in love with an African woman, and he surrenders his life to hers for nearly two decades. But years of self-abnegation, of compliance to anyone's wishes other than his own, erupt in him in a frenzy of illicit sex; finally, as the continent around him crumbles in the last days of colonialism, he realizes that even this passion is only some obscure punishment. At last, in his forties, he leaves Africa and his wife behind. Sensuality having offered him no more release than the self-denial he learned from the father he despised, he must go on seeking.
Tragic in its implications, Half a Life ruthlessly examines both the inward-turning solipsism of the East and the conquesting rage of the Westpolitical concerns, yes, but also warring aspects of the human spirit. The book is bitter, bracing andin deep and subtle waysterrifying.
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 visionis on par with Conrad's or Graham Greene's. 40,000 first printing; 5-city author tour. (Oct. 24) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
In his latest work, Naipaul continues to explore the politics of place and identity, showing how imaginative constructs become just as important and often more "real" than "reality" itself. While those with whom we surround ourselves may never see beyond a carefully groomed fa ade, who we really are eventually catches up with us. Willie Chandran (named after a famous writer) and his unfortunate sister, Sarojini, are born to parents who have sacrificed the true meanings of their lives. In an attempt to offer his life like his hero, Mahatma Gandhi, Willie's Brahmin father marries a coarse, "backward" girl from a lower caste who is at the university on a scholarship through the kindness of the Maharaja. Forever feeling his father's sacrifice of a life befitting a Brahmin and his mother's of her only chance at a course of study, which could have changed her life, Willie seems doomed to search forever for his rightful place in the world. Unmistakably autobiographical in nature, in keeping with several of his previous writings, this is a searing coming-of-age account without, of course, a tidy ending. Every public and academic library should add a copy or two not only because of the book's merits but because of Naipaul's stature. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/01.] Michelle Reale, Elkins Park Free Lib., PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
"A masterpiece of implicitness . . . explicitly concerned with drawing out the metaphysical-private while keeping it embedded in society and history . . . The ironies in Half a Life wind like a fugue into infinity . . . Identity is an enigma . . . To make that sentiment breathe in the mouth of a living character, and then rise from the page with silent laughter, is a beautiful completion: the mark of a genius and a cause of unending delight." — Lee Siegel, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"As disquieting as anything [Naipaul] has ever written . . . His terse prose works, as always, to imply a world in a phrase." — Michael Gorra, New York Times Book Review
"A troubling novel, genuinely moving . . . disturbing in all the right ways . . . the scenes of social encounters are brilliant, set against the twilight of colonial rule . . . A stunning book, three continents, three journeys, the evergreen themes of caste and class, of growing up." — Betsy Willeford, Miami Herald
"Naipaul's style is so frank it seems intimate, and the awful characters are studied and well crafted. Behind the matter-of-fact style is a cuttingly ironic view of human relations . . . When Naipaul talks, we listen." — Diane Mehta, The Atlantic Monthly
"Naipaul is a master of English prose, and the prose of Half a Life is as clean and cold as a knife." — J. M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books
"'Half a Life,' the fierce new novel by V. S. Naipaul, the new Nobel laureate, is one of those rare books that stands as both a small masterpiece in its own right and as a potent distillation of the author's work to date . . . It deftly combines Dickensian delight in character with political and social observation . . . while recounting with uncommon elegance and acerbity the coming of age of its hero, Willie Chandran ... Mr. Naipaul endows his story with the heightened power of a fable. With 'Half a Life' he has given us a powerful tale of one man's journey from childhood to middle age while at the same time creating a resonant parable about the convulsions of modern history, both the dying of old inequities and the rise of new illusions, and their spiritual legacy of homelessness and dislocation." — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"As sly and funny as anything Naipaul has written . . . He is still mining his richest obsessions . . . The classic that his new novel calls to mind is Voltaire's Candide. There is the same mocking simplicity of style, the same heartless elegance of design . . . Nobody who enjoys seeing English beautifully controlled should miss this novel." — John Carey, Sunday Times
"A surprise and a pleasure . . . here, at last, is a work of pure imagination, though the themes are characteristic in their complex peculiarity . . . Naipaul has produced the most complex and demanding body of work of any post-war British writer . . . In sentences of great precision and balance, Naipaul reanimates the dilemmas of the late and post-colonial experience . . . He reminds us again of what a fine and unusual writer he is . . . In the canon of contemporary British writing he is without peer: a cold, clear-eyed prophet, a scourge of sentimentality, irrationalism and lazy left-liberal prejudices. Read him." — Jason Cowley, The Observer Review
"Naipaul writes a prose as clean as a stripped wand, but however plain the language, the ideas it delivers are not. . . . He is still peerless as a deviser of the shocking icon. He builds a scene of metaphysical loss as compelling as any Renaissance canvas of the expulsion from paradise." — Paula Burnett, The Independent
"No writer has written more tellingly about the vocation of writing than V. S. Naipaul. . . . this new novel, Half a Life, shows us that Naipaul's absorption in how he came to be a writer is still fresh. . . . The pages about London glow, and bear comparison with anything that Naipaul has done . . . Almost casually, but beautifully, achieved . . . Captures in miniature the exceptional trajectory of Naipaul's oeuvre-the figure of the father, the life of the writer, and, finally, an enquiry into the origins of the colonial landscape itself." — Amit Chaudhuri, Times Literary Supplement
"The foremost literary interpreter of the third world for a British and American readership." — Maya Jaggi, The Guardian
"Genuinely powerful in a deeply politically incorrect way." — Jonathan Bate, Daily Telegraph
"Fresh . . . A novel with a purpose . . . Through the evocation of three continents and several decades, without calling on public events and purely through the narrative of a life, V. S. Naipaul gives us a moral tale which captures the evanescence of our times." — Farrukh Dhondy, Literary Review
"Read it for its beautifully controlled English." — The Sunday Times
"One of the world's greatest living novelists . . . A writer whose world-view has been characterised by rigorous inquiry . . . A fascinating study . . . Naipaul has thankfully lost none of his grace, style, or storytelling power in this beautiful novel." — Stuart Price, Independent
"Like a series of musical variations, the novel that follows [the first lines] never departs from them in essence . . . This is brilliant, affecting stuff: the novel's melancholy drama is played out on the furthest margins of fiction, where things are recollected rather than observed." — Rachel Cusk, Evening Standard
"Naipaul's first novel in six years is another installment in the extended fictional autobiography. . . . [This novel] may tell us more about the essential Naipaul than he has ever heretofore revealed. . . . The work of a master who has rarely, if ever, written better." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)