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Half a Life : A Novel by Naipaul, V. S. is a work of fiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Half a Life : A Novel about?

Amazon.com Review Half a Life finds the veteran Booker and Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul on familiar territory, blending autobiography and fiction in an exploration of the "half lives" of individuals brought up in the English colonies and educated in metropolitan cities. Naipaul's protagonist is Willie Somerset Chandran, named after Somerset Maugham's encounter with Willie's father in the 1930s while traveling "to get material for a novel about spirituality." Willie travels to England for his education, where he becomes "part of the special, passing bohemian-immigrant life of London of the late 1950s." Willie soon realizes that his colonial background allows him to write short stories for well-meaning white liberals, and he begins "to understand that he was free to present himself as he wished" and that he could "remake himself and his past" through his writing. The effect is suffocating rather than liberating, and he marries a vaguely sketched "girl or young woman from an African country," who has read his one published book. Willie begins another "half life" in colonial Mozambique, where he soon tires of the domestic and sexual tedium of plantation life and flees to

Who reads Half a Life : A Novel?

Author

Naipaul, V. S.

Publisher

Vintage International

Published

2002

Language

EN

ISBN

9780375407376

Category

work of fiction

Subjects

Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

Rating

3.23 / 5 (2,665 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14