Half A Life (First Edition)

V.S. Naipaul

ISBN 10: 0375407375 / ISBN 13: 9780375407376

Published by Knopf, 2001

About this Item

New York: Knopf (2001). First edition. Second printing. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. A clean, tight copy. Comes with mylar dust jacket cover. Shipped in well-padded box. Smoke-free shop. SALE.

Seller Inventory # LW-527

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Half A Life (First Edition)
• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375407375
• ISBN 13: 9780375407376
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly un-
expected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago.

Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned
his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer—strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her—carried along, really—to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own.

In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man’s determined refusal of what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, Half a Life is an indelible feat of the imagination.

About the Author

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. He lives in Wiltshire, England.