Half a Life

by V.S. Naipaul

Book Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, the Nobel Prize-winning author produced his finest novel, a bleakly resonant study of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375407375
• ISBN13: 9780375407376
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.0" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Enigmatic Brilliance

Naipul has been called one of the finest writers in the English language, and for some reason, I had never read him. I coulnd't have chosen better, I believe, in beginning my exploration of his works with Half a Life, a semi-autobiographical novel about Willie Somerset Chandran, hapless son of a Brahmin father and a "Backwards" (Untouchable?) mother, whose parentage colors his life from his earliest memories. Named after the famous author Somerset Maugham, who met Willie's father during a trip to India, Willie early on realizes that he fits in neither world in his homeland. Scorned for what and who he is, and endlessly posturing to cover up his own insecurities, he eventually escapes, as a young man, to England. And finds his posturing only achieves new levels of intentiveness. For Willie, as Naipul points out so brilliantly, is living a "half life," neither one thing nor the other in the ways that society cruelly judges himself. Excelling at university, he is nevertheless neither British nor "acceptable" Indian. Trying to be a young man about town, he finds himself frozen in situations his classmates take for granted. Trying to connect with other humans, he finds himself always aloof, always seeing things from a distance. When he falls in love--or thinks he does--it's more just the taking of an opportunity--Willie travels with his bride to her home country of Africa, and there they live for 18 years with Willie keeping his sardonic and always-apart views of their friends and family in secret. Here, too, he lives half a life, but is more comfortable as he realizes that the many African Portuguese also live this way--neither African nor Portuguese, scorning one way of life while trying to be the height of society. This is a scathing view of society in the 50s and 60s, but really it is a view of human nature, the secrets that every human holds, and that color the way lives are lived and experienced. It was a hard book for me to read, so pessimistic is it, but one that transcends its story to present some deep truths.

Have you ever taken the wrong path?

If your answer is "yes," you're going to enjoy this read. Willie Chandran, like his father before him, charts his progress in life according to others' expectations. Like a genetic disease passed down, these expectations dictate Willie's life. Never asking himself what HE really wants, Willie first tries to impress his father and when that fails, moves to London to attend college. There, Willie tries to live up to the expectations of his college chums and to fit into 1950s Bohemian London. Finally, finally Willie appears to find his own voice when a collection of his stories is published. But mixed reviews send him reeling, and again he's thrown off track, this time re-inventing himself as a pseudo-baron at his wife's family's estate in Africa. Which he doesn't stick with, either. Surprise, surprise. Life according to others' expectations never works out well. Unfortunately, finding one's own destiny is a grueling course in itself -- not for the faint-hearted. Half A Life is about what happens to the faint-hearted. And it's a profound lesson, watching Willie continually fail, never stopping to analyze what it is that really feeds his soul. I recognized a part of myself in Willie: especially some of the earlier life decisions influenced by what I thought others wanted; the feeling that once one's started down a path, the path must inexorably continue with no chance to turn back , no possibility of starting over. What a mistake that thinking is! V.S. Naipaul is a genius. Willie is not a happy character, but one turns the last page uplifted. Willie's life makes it clear: happiness lies in forging our own way. And, just as critical: the prison of others' expectations only confines when we allow it. If this resonates with you, you'll love this book.

Half A Life - Half Everything

Once again, the Nobel committee does not let us lovers of literature down. Here they choose amongst many contenders this year, Naipaul's work, which is perhaps only half-clear, even to the most exposed and insightful readers. The book starts with Willie, the main character, a product of a "half-breed" Indian marriage. His mother a low caste untouchable, who his father a Brahmin married in what appears to be a rejection of the life of his father and the casting off of the Indian system of arranged marriages and castes.Willie then chooses to go to London, and get an education, but we find him to be so naive in the ways of the world, that he again, only seems to be half a youth in what seems to him a strange and incomprehensible City, only a small piece of which he takes in during his stay while attending university there.In almost a panic, he decides that he knows not what he will do with his life after his college days end, and the college will ask him to leave the dorm, so he marries a women from Mozambique, an estate owner who herself is a "half-bred" woman, a cross between a pure Portuguese father and an African mother. For 18 years, Willie spends his life in relative comfort, but without much of a contribution and much of a life. The first 10 years or so of his life seem to consist of a vapid existence on the estate of his wife. He is merely the male presence that helps to give his wife her status in a strange and half-real society.About 11 years through all this half-life, he starts to have sexual adventures, the likes of which he has never experienced before, not with any women, not even with his wife, with whom he is very close. Yet, the sexual adventures, while exhilerating to him, seem to leave him only half-satisfied. That is, they excite him, but the meaning seems elusive to him, it seems only ephemeral sexual interaction.Then he finds himself entranced with the wife of the estate manager of a neighboring estate. She herself, seems only half-developed, and has a feeling of uselessness, married to a alcoholic husband who is a strange and unusual character. Though she has had some affairs before, she is attracted in a magnetic way to Willie, as is he to her. They have a rather intense sexual relationship, which again leaves both of them only half satisfied. This affair ends when the husband of the wife almost dies after going on an alcoholic bender, and she devotes the remainder of her life to his care, and the care of her new house, next to the estate that her husband manages.In the end, Willie decides that he must divorce his wife of 18 years and move to Germany to live with his sister. But, he seems to decide this because he has come to the half-way point of his life, and has only lived in fact, "half a life." He knows not where he has gone, nor where he is going. The only things that seemed real to him were the sexual interactions, that in the end seemed only half-real.The last line of the book, illustrates perhaps the

A Searing Look At Intercultural Colonialism

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.