В русском переводе роман Нобелевского лауреата сэра Видиадхара Найпола "Half a Life" переведен, как "Полужизнь", что может быть истолковано, как не совсем полная жизнь, жизнь вполсилы, что по контексту подходит, но всё-таки я приверженец точных переводов.
С возрастающими миграционными тенденциями современного мира роман будет получать все более актуальное звучание.
Первая часть романа описывает детство героя Вилли Сомерсета Чадрана, второе имя которого было дано ему в честь великого английского писателя Сомерсета Моэма, с которым встречался его отец во время поездки писателя в Индию, и историю женитьбы его отца, представителя касты браминов на девушке из низших каст. Вилли рвется из Индии, все равно куда - хоть в Канаду, хоть в Англию, лишь бы не оставаться в своей стране. Движущей силой его душевных порывов было уйти, он пошел учиться на учителя, которым не собирался становиться. Он знает, чего он не хочет, но не знает, чего он хочет. Человек, не знающий куда и зачем он стремится, придет туда, куда ему не нужно. Вторая часть описывает его учебу в Англии и последующий переезд в Африку.
Основная проблематика романа лежит в плоскости самоидентификации героя, который утрачивает свои культурные корни, тем самым получая травму "бездомности", когда никакая страна не является родной. Дело доходит до того, что он осознает, что забывает языки, на которых он говорил, и это при том, что он писатель. Конечно, не все мигранты таковы. Основная их ��асса всё-таки имеет цели, к которым стремятся. Ещё одну проблематику, которую поднимает писатель - это вопросы сексуального воспитания. Мне совсем не понравились мысли Чадрана о "свободе" африканских девочек-подростков, начинающих половую жизнь с приходом первых месячных.
Чадран - воплощение инфантильности. Он винит всех, особенно родителей, но ничего не делает сам. Его мир настолько узок и беден впечатлениями, наблюдениями, мыслями, что он пишет свои рассказы, используя кинематографические сюжеты и перекладывая на индийскую почву. Он выдумывает свое прошлое, чтобы лучше приспособиться. В Африке он сталкивается со строгой расовой иерархией, которая своей многоступенчатостью напоминает кастовую иерархию в Индии. 18 лет он проводит в Африке на попечении своей жены Аны, а когда осознает никчемность своей жизни там, он находит новую опору, на которой можно паразитировать - свою сестру в Германии, к которой переезжает, бросив жену.
Герой к сорока годам осознает, что прожил половину жизни, но только ли жизнь ли то была? Полужизнь. (Логику отличного от оригинала перевода понять можно). И значимость этого наблюдения Найпола за человеком, "вырванного с корнем" из родной среды, но не прижившегося нигде и болтающегося по миру, невозможно переоценить.

3,5*

Um relato simples, mas interessante que, sem estar à espera, me fez viajar da Índia, para Londres e finalmente para Moçambique colonial português.

Quite unremarkable. I haven’t read anything else by Naipaul, and I probably won’t. I know I shouldn’t generalize from reading one book, but I do anyway. Methinks Naipaul is another mediocre Nobel laureate. (Jelinek and Mahfouz are the other examples that come immediately to my mind.) The protagonist is insufferably unlikable, boring, and passive. (At least Jelinek has a sick imagination and manages to make you hate her monstrous characters.) As for the writing – honestly, I think you’ll find better examples of writing in any creative writing class.

Well, wow!

There are ways stories can be told, and there are ways they can be crafted, and there are ways they can be read. Naipaul makes each one of these processes seem so easy.

Half a Life is a strange book, and its undercurrents are its story. Naipaul gives us a story of a man who lets his life lead him across three continents and 40 years before realizing he hasn't really lived the life he wants to live; in effect, he has lived half a life.

There is this quality to Naipaulian prose; reading his words seem like drifting down a river, seeing things, imagining things, and suddenly you are somewhere else altogether. Half a Life is a triumph of storytelling; I enjoyed it thoroughly.

There are a million themes he handles, as usual, and it is hard to put a finger down on what he actually wants to tell us, what he wants us to end up with. And that is the magic of such a story; it leads you to places you didn't know were there right in front of your eyes.

Magic.

Half a Life, published a decade ago, is another one of Naipaul's spare, brooding tales that focuses on the lack of identity--cultural identity, really--that characterizes modern life. The novel begins with a kind of joke. Willie Chandran was so named for W. Somerset Maughm who once met Willie's confused father, a silent holy man in India. This brought Willie no luck, however. Maughm wrote about the father, but he never expressed interest in helping Willie, not even when Willie showed up in London.

The London Willie came to (sometime in the 50's, one imagines) was a kind of imperial beach, littered with the human artifacts that the British Empire had brought upon itself: Indians, people from the Caribbean, Africans, Canadians, and so forth. Everyone was half something, half something else.

As it happens, Willie has some luck writing for the BBC while pursuing studies at an unnamed college. He then squeezes a book of short stories out of himself, most of the stories fables set in imaginary kingdoms. One thinks, aha, like Maughm Willie will become a writer, and perhaps a successful one. But no, here Naipaul breaks off his own personal saga (he came to London from Trinidad and established himself as a writer from the get-go) and takes Willie on a kind of cultural/sexual saga wherein he experiments with whores, loose Brits looking for a fling with a man of color, and then a Portuguese-African, Ana, who in some ways saves him. They move to a Portuguese colony in Africa where her father left her an estate, and for eighteen years Willie accomodates himself to luxury in the bush, with occasional night rides into the dance halls of black Africans where his needs are explosively satisfied by very young women.

His life seems pointless. The lives around him also seem pointless. High points are the night rides and the weekend lunches at other estates, where the architectural grandeur (or pretension) is not matched by intrinsic human interest. (Sidenote: Having spent much of my life exposed to well-to-do ex-pats, I'm of the opinion that they're among the saddest of all human beings, ravenous to hear about the States but insistent that they know the States better, far better, than anyone who actually lives there.)

Then Willie meets a woman named Gracia, who is his instant soulmate although she's trapped in a marriage to a drunk estate manager. Well, there's a loping quality in a Naipaul in which "one day" these things happen; they just do. Two eyes meet two eyes and all four eyes explode with understanding.

But meanwhile the Portuguese-based regime is crumbling; black Africa is reclaiming its rightful place, and Gracia and Willia (and Ana) are pulled apart, unsure that any of them has really had a life, or perhaps even half a life, the book's title.

Oops, I gave the ending away, but this hardly matters. Naipaul excels in perfectly controlled, clearly focused, exotic studies of people and the cultural landscapes in which they dwell. That's what you read him for. This isn't Of Human Bondage, big and throbbing and heart-wrenching. No, Willie and other protagonists in Naipaul's books are written in minor keys. Their claims are acute but modest; they are trapped betwixt and between, and that's what one reads Naipaul to experience...that ambiguity and ambivalence...that sense that among ex-pats there are at least a few thoughtful, pained figures worth your time.

Read this way back, and only realised through a writer's forum chat that there was a second half, Magic Seeds.
Sorry to hear the fellow's dead now. Bad news. He was a good writer.

Não gostei do primeiro livro que li de Naipaul e pensei ser um escritor para esquecer. Mas como a vida me ensinou que o que hoje amarga amanhã pode ser doce, e vice-versa, dei-me uma outra oportunidade. E foi um prazer conhecer Willy Chandran — o filho de um brâmane que casa com uma mulher de uma casta baixa, de quem não gosta, apenas para ir contra as tradições. Desgostoso com a vida familiar, Willy, aos vinte anos, abandona a Índia e vai estudar para Londres. Aí conhece Ana e parte com ela para o seu país — uma colónia portuguesa em África.
Quer Willy, quer o seu pai, são dois homens desenquadrados na sociedade em que estão inseridos e que procuram um rumo para a sua vida, diferente do que seria esperado e, aparentemente, pior; ou seja, recusando aceitar o seu "destino" condenam-se a uma vida de constantes inquietações.

_____________
Prémio Nobel da Literatura 2001
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul nasceu em Trindade e Tobago (Chaguanas) em 17 de Agosto de 1932 e morreu em Inglaterra (Londres) em 11 de Agosto de 2018.

It is telling that I forgot the name of the main character as I am writing this review. He is less important, I think, than the scenes he sets as we travel with him from child to adult and across three continents. While it is largely a coming of age story, the emphasis is on his sexual awakening, which doesn't occur until halfway through the book or more. The real story though, is about systems of racial categorization and subjugation. The caste system of the protagonists birth country is ever present in various form in England, where the main character goes to school, and in Africa where his life takes him ( and it does take him, he seems to have little agency in all that happens to him). The book has a slit lay bitter tone, but it may just be the main characters weakness that comes across as bitter, and his inability to define himself or create a self that he is comfortable with.

En una ciudad India de mediados del siglo XX, Willie, hijo de un brahmán que decidió renunciar a su jerarquía social en pos de un extraño sacrificio al casarse con una mujer de la casta más baja, sabe que en su tierra no le espera ningún futuro, por lo que convence a su padre —a quien desprecia profundamente por obsequiarle semejante herencia— de enviarlo a Inglaterra, donde estudiará becado para obtener un título de maestro. Ése será el principio de una reestructuración de su identidad y una revisión de sus orígenes y sus odios desde una perspectiva llena de lejanía y de paulatina comprensión. Al cabo de los años que dura su beca, y a sabiendas de que regresar a su país significará siempre llegar a un lugar sin futuro para él, decide seguir a una chica al África oriental, a una colonia portuguesa en la que vivirá los siguientes dieciocho años, justo cuando la huida en masa de los colonizadores lo llevará buscar nuevamente su lugar en el mundo, no sin antes hacer cada vez más descubrimientos sobre sí mismo, sobre sus mojigatos conceptos acerca de la sexualidad, y continuará desarrollando una visión cada vez más piadosa de sus padres, atrapados bajo el peso de idiosincracias milenarias.

Creo que de no ser por el final, innecesariamente precipitado, este habría sido un libro memorable. Naipaul posee la magia del narrador oriental y un humor transgresor propio de otras latitudes, con lo que resulta difícil no engancharse con su prosa, pero en Media vida da la sensación de que en las últimas páginas llegó a un callejón sin salida, o de que, en un reflejo demasiado literal del título, estamos sólo ante la mitad de una existencia. Bien, pero ¿y después? Siento que me faltó esa parte.

naipaul is BRUTUAL! many people are critical of his unsympathetic and even accusatory attitude towards citizens of undeveloped countries... but he's got something valid to say and it's worth hearing. this semi-autobiographical work explains how one can be both vulnerable and responsible. in other words, power is not only to be claimed by the wealthy. it's up for grabs.

Este foi o meu primeiro livro de Naipaul, não será o último, mas estava à espera de ter gostado mais. Gostei da história, que nos conta parte (metade) da vida de Willie Somerset Chandran, começando pela dos seus pais, um brâmane e uma mulher de casta inferior, com quem se casou por um capricho de juventude.

A vida de Willie passa pela Índia, Reino Unido e Moçambique, na altura ainda uma colónia portuguesa. O livro retrata muito bem a falta de rumo de Willie, a forma como se sente perdido e vai vivendo os acontecimentos um pouco à medida como eles se lhe apresentam, sem planeamento nem objetivos. Tem passagens muito bonitas.

”O seu mundo em África estava a chegar ao fim; não creio que nenhum dos presentes pusesse isso em causa, apesar de todos os discursos e do cerimonial; mas todos estavam tranquilos, a desfrutar o momento, a encher a velha sala com os seus risos e conversas, como se não se importassem com o que viria a acontecer, como pessoas que sabiam viver com a história. Nunca admirei tanto os portugueses como nesse momento.”

Acho que o que gostei menos, e me impede de lhe dar mais de três estrelas foi a obsessão de Willie com a sua virilidade, que atravessa o livro do princípio ao fim e se torna um tanto obsessiva. Ainda assim, tiro o chapéu a Naipaul, que consegue descrever as cenas mais desagradáveis sem nunca cair na vulgaridade, e por vezes tornando-as mesmo bonitas.

É também um prazer pegar num livro tão bem traduzido, que temos a sensação de ter sido escrito na nossa língua, que foi o que me aconteceu com este, traduzido por José Vieira de Lima.

"Levara comigo uma capa de borracha do exército. Estendi-a no alpendre e deitámo-nos nela sem trocar palavra.
(…) e eu pensei quão terrível teria sido se, como facilmente poderia ter acontecido, eu tivesse morrido sem conhecer uma tal profundidade de satisfação (...)"