I picked up this book half expecting to put it down 10-15 pages into it because I felt I might not be able to relate to the story of a man born in India, raised in England, and lived through Africa. But I couldn't have been more wrong.

I do not know whether it was the conscious "I might not relate to it" running through my mind which is exactly what he begins by addressing, or the lucid deconstruction of the pretentious intellect-living-in-a-cocoon that hit home the hardest, but I managed to connect with Willie Chandran with such ease from the word go that I surprised myself with it.

The premise seemed to develop itself naturally till the halfway mark, and Naipaul's extraordinary ability to take the reader into the shoes of every minor character was the catalyst that kept it going.

But towards the second half of the second half, I began to lose interest thanks to the monotonous narration and I felt like the book should have ended 100 pages earlier.

My suggestion would be to read the first half, and not feel guilty about putting it away after that without reading the rest of it.

This is not Naipaul at his best. That said, he's still head and shoulders above most of people writing.

A continuation of his previous novel "Half a Life", we follow the protagonist Willie as he drifts through the next couple of decades in his life, from his sister's house in Berlin to the guerrilla camps and then jails of India, and then finally back to post-modern cosmopolitan London, feeling nothing but his passivity and anomie all along the way.

In typical Naipaul fashion, the prose is lush and gorgeous, with descriptive passages that captivate like no other can. Yet, the characters and situations are emotionally flat and lifeless, and retreads of themes he's been working with for decades, often done better in past novels.

In some ways, you can feel age working its way into Naipaul in this story. The transmutation of rage and creative fire slowly simmering down to something like bitter acceptance of a flawed world, and brutal misanthropy becoming just aged crankiness.

If Naipaul has just one more novel in him (which is hard to believe being he's in his 80s now), I'd love for him to explore the themes of an old man, instead of creating two novels in which a preternaturally aged young man lives his life almost like an old man going over his memories in tired contemplation.

That said, I still think it's worth a read, as all his novels are. When he is gone, the world will be a far lesser place, and literature will be left to the childish fantasists and bourgeois college lecture hall revolutionaries who will no doubt dance on his grave.

Life is a constant maneuver of thoughts into action. Nothing in life is ever late to start fresh with. Peace! Wonderful book that provokes one into looking their self's journey of discovery.

Not sure how i feel about this book. I really liked Willie and loved his thoughts and musings on idealism and ideology, trying to "make a difference" and how that can be led astray.
However... the lengthy passages about his wealthy friend Roger toward the end seemed to make the story disjointed, and I am still not really sure how that and Marcus' son's wedding fits with the rest of the narrative.

3 starts because Willie's story and character were memorable and enjoyable.

Edit: Roger's complete dismissal (or is it wilful ignoring) of the men who are responsible for the "mistakes" in the lives of women from Council estates really, REALLY annoyed me.