Series
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- 224 pages
- 8 hours of reading
More about the book
In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul has produced his finest novel to date, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity. The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portugese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray. Brilliantly orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul's career.
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Half a Life, V. S. Naipaul
- Language
- Released
- 2002
- product-detail.submit-box.info.binding
- (Paperback)
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- Title
- Half a Life
- Language
- English
- Authors
- V. S. Naipaul
- Publisher
- National Geographic Books
- Released
- 2002
- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 224
- ISBN10
- 037570728X
- ISBN13
- 9780375707285
- Series
- Willie Chandran
- Tags
- Fiction, Religion & Spirituality, Historical Fiction, Religion, Germany, England, Life, Sexuality & Intimacy, Great Britain, Africa, Berlin, London, India, Escape, Identity, Nobel prize, Hinduism, Post-War Era, Portugal, Colonialism, Outsider
- Rating
- 3.25 out of 5
- Description
- In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul has produced his finest novel to date, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity. The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portugese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray. Brilliantly orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul's career.