Half a Life
- Author V. S. Naipaul
- Narrator Neil Shah
- Publisher Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date 18 September 2018
- Run Time 7 hours and 7 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Fiction: general and literary.
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What to expect
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 Portuguese 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.
Critics Review
“Naipaul is a master of English prose, and the prose of Half a Life is as clean and cold as a knife.”
“As disquieting as anything [Naipaul] has ever written…His terse prose works, as always, to imply a world in a phrase.”
“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.”
“Naipaul’s style is so frank it seems intimate, and the awful characters are studied and well crafted…When Naipaul talks, we listen.”
“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.”
“As sly and funny as anything Naipaul has written…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…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.”
“One of the world’s greatest living novelists…Naipaul has thankfully lost none of his grace, style, or storytelling power in this beautiful novel.”
“A troubling novel, genuinely moving…disturbing in all the right ways…A stunning book, three continents, three journeys, the evergreen themes of caste and class, of growing up.”
“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.”
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