V. S. Naipaul - Half a Life

Stunning. Brilliant. A story of remarkable economy. Naipaul writes with the haunting efficiency of an ancient legend powerful and unsettling.

The Christian Science Monitor

A superb exercise, in miniature, of Mr. Naipaul's finest gift, a revelation of history's disastrous impact on private life.

The Wall Street Journal

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, The New York Review of Books

Full of memorable passages that astonish by their economy and precision. Naipaul has clearly not lost his gift of summing up the sights and smells of a place within a few sentences. His powers as a shrewd observer communicate themselves strongly.

The Boston Globe

As sly and funny as anything Naipaul has written. Nobody who enjoys seeing English beautifully controlled should miss this novel.

Sunday Times (London)

Brilliant. Profoundly intimate. Naipaul is a magical storyteller. He weaves a complex, nuanced tapestry of colonial and postcolonial character and attitudes, of radical notions and movements, of the immense mysteriousness of singular personal identity. Naipaul, at the peak of his powers, never wastes a word. Half a Life affirms the wisdom of the Swedish Academy. It's a humane book, full of courage, wisdom and memorable reading.

The Baltimore Sun

Magnificent. With deft, elliptical plotting, Half a Life evokes the draining cost of [a rootless] way of living. [It consists] of several journeys woven brilliantly into a larger, more restless spiritual one [and] offers a string of gemlike moments, ones where the intricate latticework of colonial identity rises up and makes itself brutally and indelibly felt.

Dallas Morning News

Half a Life confirms Naipaul's stature as the greatest living analyst of the colonial and postcolonial dilemma. Those who have never approved of that analysis, and have objected over the years to what they see as Naipaul's fatalism, snobbery or even racism, may find in this book the surprise of a submerged radicalism, a willingness to see things from the eyes of the disadvantaged.

James Wood, The New Statesman

Pure magic. I cannot think of another novelist with Naipaul's feeling for the distinctiveness of cultures. A fine book and no one but Naipaul could have written it.

S. R. B. Iyer, The Columbus Dispatch

Nuanced and evocative. Here, sentence by sentence, is the consummate craftsmanship, the perception, the precision, the style the Nobel committee lauded as vigilant. Here, too, is Naipaul giving rein to comical talents that may not have been at full stretch since he published the incomparable A House for Mr. Biswas in 1961.

The Globe and Mail

[A] gem of a novel. [Naipaul's] descriptive powers are masterful, and his language spare and economical. Every word counts and conveys meaning. A very well-crafted and brilliant novel of ideas.

The Orlando Sentinel

A surprise and a pleasure. Naipaul has produced the most complex and demanding body of work of any post-war British writer. In sentences of great precision and balance, [he] reanimates the dilemmas of late and post-colonial experience. He is without peer.

The Observer Review

Beautifully imagined and subtly satiric. Naipaul presents [a] disturbing social vision in prose that seems stripped of all emotion and yet proves emotionally powerful.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

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.

The Independent

A challenging, tantalizing book that blossoms in the imagination of the reader.

San Jose Mercury News

Almost casually, but beautifully, achieved. Captures in miniature the trajectory of Naipaul's oeuvre.

The Times Literary Supplement

The latest example of how powerful the search for identity can be in literature.

The Buffalo News

A brief, insightful study of the development of a highly inventive writer.

The Seattle Times

What Joseph Conrad was to his age, V. S. Naipaul is to ours. Conrad's meditation on the world of imperialism has its worthy counterpart in Naipaul's expansive account of postcolonial realities.

The New Leader

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990. He lives in Wiltshire, England.

ALSO BY V. S. NAIPAUL

NONFICTION

The Writer and the World

Between Father and Son: Family Letters

Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

India: A Million Mutinies Now

A Turn in the South

Finding the Center

Among the Believers

The Return of Eva Pern (with The Killings in Trinidad)

India: A Wounded Civilization

The Overcrowded Barracoon

The Loss of El Dorado

An Area of Darkness

The Middle Passage

FICTION

A Way in the World

The Enigma of Arrival

A Bend in the River

Guerrillas

In a Free State

A Flag on the Island

The Mimic Men

Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion*

A House for Mr. Biswas

The Suffrage of Elvira*

Miguel Street

The Mystic Masseur

Published in an omnibus edition entitled The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book

N. K. N.

W ILLIE C HANDRAN asked his father one day, Why is my middle name Somerset? The boys at school have just found out, and they are mocking me.

His father said without joy, You were named after a great English writer. I am sure you have seen his books about the house.

But I haven't read them. Did you admire him so much?

I am not sure. Listen, and make up your own mind.

And this was the story Willie Chandran's father began to tell. It took a long time. The story changed as Willie grew up. Things were added, and by the time Willie left India to go to England this was the story he had heard.

*

T HE WRITER (Willie Chandran's father said) came to India to get material for a novel about spirituality. This was in the 1930s. The principal of the maharaja's college brought him to me. I was doing penance for something I had done, and I was living as a mendicant in the outer courtyard of the big temple. It was a very public place, and that was why I had chosen it. My enemies among the maharaja's officials were hounding me, and I felt safer there in the temple courtyard, with the crowds coming and going, than in my office. I was in a state of nerves because of this persecution, and to calm myself I had also taken a vow of silence. This had won me a certain amount of local respect, even renown. People would come to look at me being silent and some would bring me gifts. The state authorities had to respect my vow, and my first thought when I saw the principal with the little old white fellow was that it was a plot to make me talk. This made me very obstinate. People knew that something was afoot and they stood around to watch the encounter. I knew they were on my side. I didn't say anything. The principal and the writer did all the talking. They talked about me and they looked at me while they talked, and I sat and looked through them like someone deaf and blind, and the crowd looked at all three of us.