Half a Life: A Novel
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.
Reviews:
(2 months ago) |
14 Aug, 2025
the book ends in Mozambique -- controlled by the Portuguese, so has an interesting history of colonialism
of that country.
|
(1 year ago)
|
13 Sep, 2024
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(2 months ago)
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25 Aug, 2025
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Challenge:
Read Around North America Challenge
Country:
Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago
Language:
EN
Genre:
Psychology
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