Was I not in the mood or was this book complete shit?

My first Naipaul and what a disaster. In the beginning, I was enjoying it. The writing was sharp and to the point, the story intriguing and well-paced but after 50 pages or so everything started to go down. Half A Life tells the story of Willie Somerset Chandran, the son of a Brahmin father and a Dalit mother. It’s about the loss of identity, rootlessness and what it is to be someone.

The book starts with the story of how Chandran’s father met his mother and that was the most interesting part of the novel. But soon the focus turns to the main character and the book loses its shine and ultimately becomes the color of copper when he sets foot in London. I knew as soon as the setting changed that something was afoot and it took me a hundred or so pages to figure out what was exactly wrong with it. There was no arch to it, no built up, just pointless interaction with this character and that character. The themes seemed untimely and provided nothing new. The aimlessness of the story annoyed me to the point where I gave up on the book, and considering that I could have finished this 200-something-page novel but didn’t. there was no motivation whatsoever. And that says something about the book, right?

Anyway, maybe not the best place to start with Naipaul. Tell me, have you read anything by him? If yes, what should I pick next?

Content warning: This review mentions sexual assault of both adult women and children.

If there’s anything that could ever make me swear off reading for good, it’s the kind of books I’ve had to read for my English degree. The author of Half a Life has won the nobel prize, and yet I can’t remember the last time I read such an awful, pointless, disgusting piece of fiction. I can honestly say that I hated it and, although it’s only 228 pages long, regret every second I spent reading it.

This book has no plot, it’s just the author’s thinly fictionalised reminiscences of his student life in London, passed off as the protagonist's life story. Followed by a fictional episode about him leeching off his wife while living in Africa and sleeping with underaged prostitutes. You know, the stuff great literature is made of.

Willie and his father are the most pathetic, repulsive characters I’ve read about in ages. The entire book is a second-hand walk of shame: Whether it was Willie publishing a book with stories stolen from Hollywood films, his pathetic (and for some reasons successful) attempts to sleep with his friends’ girlfriends or being so bad at sex that even prostitutes throw him off after a while, I cringed constantly. And his father’s story about marrying a dark-skinned woman he despised to fulfil some sort of self-deprecating desire to become a social outcast wasn’t much better.

To make things worse, the book is full of horrible clichés: Black men are sexually insatiable and only after white women, Indians are sexist and abuse their family members, and women, of course, are senseless objects whose only purpose is to have sex with the protagonist. (Normally, I try to separate an author’s biography from their work but let’s just say that, considering the appalling attitude towards women in this book, I wasn’t surprised to read that the author abused his own lover for years.)

With the overall lack of plot and unappealing characters, I would have expected the writing to be the redeeming aspect of this book. But Naipaul’s prose does absolutely nothing for me. The way I understand it, he tries to wrap supposedly deep insights into simplistic sentences, but what you actually end up with is something like this:

That philosophical-practical way of dealing with sex belongs to our past, and that world was ravaged and destroyed by the Muslims. Now we live like incestuous little animals in a hole. We grope all our female relations and are always full of shame. Nobody talked about sex and seduction at home, but I discover now that it is the fundamental skill all men should be trained in. […] When I asked Percy how he had learned he said he started small, fingering and then raping little girls. I was shocked by that. I am not so shocked now. (p. 118)

A classic indeed.

VS Naipaul is out of fashion now. Who cares about him? Well, I do. Somehow, I always felt Naipaul spoke for things which I cared about. Look, I would not have invited the guy for lunch. He was always an openly grouchy person, who proudly displayed his cruelty. But I always felt like he spoke for people like me. Most people furiously stick up for their favorite political party. I loyally stick up for my favorite writers on Goodreads.

I always thought of Naipaul as a brilliant but bitter teacher trying to pass on some messages to his audience. I think he was writing for Indians. Who read his novels? I think middle class Indians and other great writers. I do not know a famous writer who has not said something nice about Naipaul. Everyone from Hunter S Thompson to Marlon James adored him.

Let me sell Naipaul to you guys. He was this really grouchy Indian from the Caribbean (his ancestors were bonded laborers over there) who had a problem with nearly everyone in the world. He hated his own people (“Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover."). He hated the Caribbean. He once said the post-war British were proud of being stupid and quite gloriously shat on the sexual mores of white working class British women in the sequel to this novel. He did like rednecks. He sympathized, with a few conditions, with Hindu nationalists. He wrote three books about his travels across the Islamic world, which were like a warning. He used to beat up his Argentinian mistress, which he admitted to his biographer.

Half a Life is a bitter novel. It speaks the truth about a phony and debilitating Hindu upbringing full of false choices and grandstanding to hide ones own mediocrity. It underscores the inadequacy of the early Indian immigrants of the second half of the 20th century to fit into British society. Naipaul often talked quite honestly about his own sexual rage and this novel is filled with the sexual impotence and longings of Willie Chandran, an Indian immigrant who is utterly lost in post world war England. His relationship with an African lady which takes him to Africa seems to have pissed off many reviewers of this book. But if you are an Indian, you know what this man writes is the truth. The inadequacy, desolation and precariousness of our lives wherever we go, is perfectly described by Naipaul.

I sort of understand Indians and people from other parts of the world who hate Naipaul. Here is a writer who took more risks than Bruce Willis holding up that banner in Die Hard 3. It is almost as if Naipaul wanted to be hated. He was not even like Michel Houellebecq or someone who granted some solace with the sex scenes in his novels. Naipaul, simply wanted to write the truth which we all long to escape from but consume secretly :) Christopher Hitchens once described Naipaul as "unassailable". That is the perfect one word description of Naipaul's artistic intent. Yes, here is one writer who never played any games and wrote what he really felt. Nobody cares about him now. It is sad, but not surprising.

I came across this book when I was looking at the OTHER Half a Life, and I had heard of V.S. Naipaul but never read any of his work so picked this one up.

It may have helped me if I'd read his earlier stuff to understand this story completely. The main character, Willie Somerset Chandran, is born (in the 1930s) of a marriage between a Brahmin father and Untouchable mother. From the beginning of his life, he felt he did not belong. (Cue Cher's "Half Breed" here. Kidding!)

He heads to London for college studies and falls easily into the "bohemian" lifestyle of friends he has made there, and he becomes a writer, but there's still an emptiness at his core.

A young woman, Ana, has read a book he has published and writes to him, praising his work and wanting to discuss it. They meet and begin an affair.

Then the Notting Hill race riots begin, and he also feels his family closing in on him, wanting him to go back to India. He decides to flee London with Ana, and he proposes to her that they go live in Mozambique, in the Portuguese colony where she is from, to begin their lives together, thinking it will be only temporary. They remain there for 18 years, and of course he is still very much the outsider here.

The book seems to come to an abrupt end, like it's only half a book about half a life.

Beautiful writing, but I can't say it was totally engaging. That said, I'd still like to go back and read some of his other work.

V.S. Naipaul is a literary craftsman which his "Half a Life” won him the Nobel Prize in literature in this tale of a man snagged in cultural crosscurrents "Half a Life" is really two half novels . Naipaul is showing us persons with mixed cultures who are confused ,and trying to remake themselves and their past. He shows Willie’s lack of knowledge and sexual impulses frankly Willie says “ we are not all born with sexual skill, and there are no schools where we can be trained “Naipaul illustrates intercontinental cultural differences truly… actually political and racial tensions of the novel . The fact that the story ends before the end of Willie's life hoping that Willie will be able to overcome the past and start a new life... the book is worth reading”

This had been on my To Read List for quite a while. I found it engrossing. His incredible writing has earned him a Nobel Prize and I'd read this was part autobio/history/fiction. It's definitely an eye-opening story about Imperialism and the caste system and one man's coming-of-age.

Willie Chandran, nascunt in India, intr-o familie disfuntionala, unde tatal a ales sa intoarca spatele mostenirii brahmane si s-a casatorit cu o femeie dintr-o casta inferioara (o uniune regretabila si dezastruoasa), ajuns la maturitatea pleaca la Londra. "-Nu platim oare cu totii, zi de zi, pentru pacatele trecutului, in timp ce acumulam pedepse pentru viitor?"
Ajuns in Anglia, intr-o cu totul alta lume si cultura, Willie incearca sa-si cladeasca o noua identitate printre imigrantii si boemii anilor 1950. "Totul merge in prejudecati. Lumea ar trebui sa se opreasca, dar continua."
Avand un subiect interesant si o aroma orientala credeam ca are ingredientele necesare pentru a imi capta atentia, dar nu a fost asa. Desi incepe binisor, mi s-a parut ca pe parcurs incepe sa fie lipsita de viata si plictisitoare.

An odd story. The life of Willie who is born after his father marries a low caste woman. He goes to London where he falls for the first woman who shows him kindness. Ana from either Angola or Mozambique where he goes and lives on her estate. For me his sister has the more interesting life.

Willie basically has an aimless life. He finally leaves Africa to go to Germany to see his sister. Where he tells her about his life. I am curious though to read the sequel.

الضياء والاقتراب ليس فقط سيما لهذه الروايه بل هو ثيمه لهذا العالم الجديد اليوم مع تبدد الهويه واللاجدوى باختلاط اللامكان

Like all his other books, each character has a story with a past and present that shapes their thinking. All the supporting characters serve a purpose that aids the life of the main character. His in-depth knowledge of politics creates an aura that makes his fiction feel more real than reality itself.

I am absolutely astounded that this book was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature! I am an avid bibliophile, and this book was the worst book I've had the displeasure of reading. It was a series of uneventful meanderings of a man with no direction or drive. This story is devoid of any purpose and emotion. The one and only point in this book that evokes any feeling is the portion that invokes disgust and rage when he divulges his only passion in life, his unapologetic perverse pedophelia in the form of 11 year old African girls and extramarital affairs. What an utter waste of time. The reviews on the back of his book must have been well paid to fabricate such statements.

I read this novel as the search for and acceptance of the essence of one's true identity. This is a quest upon which Naipaul himself, no doubt, embarked, after his birth in Trinidad, education in England at Oxford, and life in Africa. The challenge of his protagonist is, having been born a "backwards", to understand and accept his real essence as a human being. He tends to approach this existential task by entangling himself in the lives of other people only to find that their lives bring him no closer to the truth about himself. He discovers that he cannot to his own self be true simply by living the lives of others. The characters, setting and imagery in Half a Life are memorable and the narration enjoys a frankness that engenders respect. While this is a very fine work by V.S. Naipaul, it suffers somewhat by comparison to A House for Mr. Biswas, which is a truly brilliant novel. What does one do for an encore after one writes a real masterpiece? If you haven't read it yet, you may want to try it first. All the acclaim of Naipaul is justified: he can really write and Mr. Biswas is hands-down his finest work. I recommend that you go for Mr. Biswas and then, if you like it, circle back to worthy but somewhat less daunting works like Half a Life -- unless you prefer a toe-in-the-water approach with this Nobel Prize winner. One really can't go wrong with V.S. Naipaul except not to read him.