Rating: 
Summary: Life and love in the shadow of colonialism
Review: "Half a Life," by V.S. Naipaul, tells the story of Willie Chandran, born to a priestly caste father and a lower caste woman in India. The novel follows its conflicted protagonist to England and to a Portuguese colony in Africa; along the way we see both his romantic/sexual strivings and his efforts to express himself as a writer.This book offers a fascinating glimpse at the disintegration of colonial regimes in India and Africa. This is a novel with a truly global span; Naipaul creates an intriguing group of characters and interrelationships. There are a number of characters whose relationships or backgrounds reflect the crossing of lines of caste, color, and/or ethnicity. The story is nicely enhanced by Naipaul's straightforward prose style. It's a tale of love, rebellion, loss, regret, and the quest for identity.
Rating:
Summary: Life and love in the shadow of colonialism
Review: "Half a Life," by V.S. Naipaul, tells the story of Willie Chandran, born to a priestly caste father and a lower caste woman in India. The novel follows its conflicted protagonist to England and to a Portuguese colony in Africa; along the way we see both his romantic/sexual strivings and his efforts to express himself as a writer. This book offers a fascinating glimpse at the disintegration of colonial regimes in India and Africa. This is a novel with a truly global span; Naipaul creates an intriguing group of characters and interrelationships. There are a number of characters whose relationships or backgrounds reflect the crossing of lines of caste, color, and/or ethnicity. The story is nicely enhanced by Naipaul's straightforward prose style. It's a tale of love, rebellion, loss, regret, and the quest for identity.
Rating:
Summary: Whose Life is This? We need to talk.
Review: A tenet of our civilization is that an education will prepare us to read, ponder and presumably enjoy the great writers of literature. And so, university diploma in hand, I reached out for Half A Life by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, V.S. Naipaul. Admittedly not having read anything previously by Naipaul, I was anxious to read this relatively short work. Alas, there is a lot to ponder but little to enjoy in this book. It doesn't take the reader long to realize that Naipaul is a master writer. The prose is simple; his sentences crisp and short; the tale easily unfolds. The main character is Willie Somerset Chandron, and his life is the tale Naipaul tells. Early on in the book, Willie is described as "the mission-school student who had not completed his education, with no idea of what he wanted to do, except to get away from what he knew, and yet with very little idea of what lay outside what he knew..." And so, the book traces Willie's aimlessness and his search to find his place in life as he wanders from India to England to Africa. Naipaul overlays many themes to explain Willie's lack of engagement in life: the Indian caste system, racial prejudices, youthful rebellion to name a few and explores them in unique ways. The combination of them is overwhelming to think about, let alone live through, and perhaps that was Naipaul's thesis in explaining why Willie couldn't fully engage. This is a difficult book not to discuss with someone. I think members of book discussion clubs would like it very much for the number of issues raised and the life it describes. Anyone who reads this book will appreciate fine writing, even if they don't come away entertained.
Rating:
Summary: Well written, but depressing
Review: As usual, Mr. Naipaul has written a highly readable book. I did miss the beauty of the Trinidad dialect that is sometimes in his books, but this story of a young man from India who goes to England and then Africa, remaking himself, is strangely intriguing. I cannot say that I liked the main character as a person -- I don't understand his motivation -- but still, the book is worth reading. I am hoping that the sequel will make all clear to me.
Rating:
Summary: Truth most writers won't tell you
Review: For a book that I didn't really like a lot, it was one I found very readable. After the first 30 pages or so, which reminded me of Narayan's The Guide, I was next reminded of Naipaul's own A House for Mr. Biswas. There's a father-son element in these pages which is easy to relate to Naipaul's 2000 collection of letters between himself and his own father. Perhaps the meanings that one senses early in the book are pretty much the ones that one ends with. The book's not much of an advertisement for humanism. I imagine that Malcolm Muggeridge would have approved of this book for that reason as well as because its prose is so good. When I had finished Half a Life, I found myself thinking it should be compared to another book whose narrative ends in a remote, exotic, and, to the author, unappealing locale -- namely, Evelyn Waugh's famous novel, A Handful of Dust. Naipaul convinces us that Willie Chandran, the protagonist/narrator, has had various sexual experiences, including, in his late thirties or at around forty, ones that give him more physical satisfaction than he had experienced before - - but that they are recognized as a dead end, so that even while Willie is preoccupied with them (his life has become idle), he tells us that a "half-feeling of the inanity of my life grew within me, and with it there came the beginning of respect for the religious outlawing of sexual extremes." That isn't something 99 out of a hundred modern novelists would tell you, and most of them wouldn't tell you that, I suppose, because they aren't smart enough and honest enough to do so. It doesn't seem that Naipaul falls for the line that, in a world ultimately meaningless, the best chance many of us have for an interesting life is a sexually varied one.
Willie can write, earlier, that he thought "how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence." That is something that, I believe, many modern writers believe or want to believe, but Naipaul doesn't leave it at that.
Rating: 
Summary: Three Continents take us through one half of this life
Review: Half a Life is an incredible book. First, we hear the story of Willie Chandran's father, who married out of caste, and with his wife had children whom he began to regret as he regretted the marriage. The story leads the reader slowly down to the caste system and into the book. Enter Willie, the regetted, the live-er of a second half-life, attempting to escape but being hounded by the regrets of his father. Willie begins in India, as a child who says he despises his father, who goes to a mission school, whose sister is named Sarojini, after "the women poet of the independence movement". The mission school is the place of forgotten and despised ones, forcibly rejected or bullied into leaving the caste schools. Willie grows up here, becomes cynical here, and finally stops going to school here. He becomes idle in India. Now enter Willie, enter England. Here, he reinvents himself in an attempt to become free of his father's shadow. His sexual adventures with his friend's girl and his summary sexual rejection continue his despisal of his father and escalate his hammered, rocky, increase in confidence. He is studying at a little redbrick university that cheaply follows the customs of Oxford and Cambridge. At this university, he falls in love with a woman who takes him back to Africa. Enter Willie, enter African colonialism. Enter the elite and their servants and the revolution. At first, in this strange new land which Willie vows to one day leave, he loves Ana intensely. But enter Willie's despair, his own revolution in the form of a young, beautiful girl and a brothel filled with young whores. The whores, in his guilty moments, remind him of a young Sarojini, of whom he hears little until he finds she has been married and she has changed some. Willie Chandran knows that his wife (Ana) suspects or knows of his visits to the brothel and the young woman. He beings to realize that she feels terribly guilty for her suspiscions. While the near-elite friends of Willie's and Ana's visit and talk, the disabled Mrs. Norohona prophesies vaguely and is obeyed blindly. She is obeyed until one person rejects her predictions. Then her power is broken. Willie isn't a good man even before he begins sleeping with women at the brothel. When he does this, the power of his mistaken marriage is broken. The upheaval of the war, Willie's gradual erosion, and the weakening of Willie's and Ana's marriage nearly complete this sad and real tour, of half a life across three continents.
Rating:
Summary: More like a 1/3 of a life though quite good
Review: Half a life is at times extremely compelling. Other times I found myself rushing a bit to get to better parts. And still other times I had to go back and take a look again to see what I missed only to find I hadn't missed anything but was required to fill in some blanks. The problem is not the language. It is clean and clear unaffected prose and quite Naipaulian. The problem if it can be called a problem is that it's a short book. Perhaps in some way it seems too short. The character of Willie Chandran starts off as if he is to be developed in such a way as to make him grow before our eyes but he rather "jumps" through the periods of time instead of growing. The story of his father and his prejudices and suffering and the early life of Willie in London becoming both writer and sexual novitiate are by far excellent pieces that probably could stand on their own as short stories. Naipaul foreshortens the novel by skipping over a lot of Africa and only gets the story to us via Willie telling it to his sister also in somewhat of a foreshortened manner. Naipaul's narrator dwells mainly on his sexual growth which in fact I enjoyed reading with prurient interest. I did long for a bit more dialogue instead of narration. But this seems more like Naiapaul's style than choice. Naipaul, however, does develop a tale about an outsider and provides us with some psychological insight into inauthenticity. And the outsider, no matter what his/her race or class or caste and the place that he/she exists or country of origin, still feels like the outsider, still feels fraudulent and any sense of self-satisfaction or a feeling of belonging is always precarious and an indication that a fall is just around the corner. I don't think even years of shrinking could help this character. (BTW I'm not a shrink) The fact that such social realities are easier to highlight in a period of time set during colonial domination and upheaval and races and classes are clearly understood social phenomena is the writer's choice and no doubt due to his experiences. I kept thinking while I was reading that this type of drama could be transported to a contemporary American setting, though not as easily, where we all live half lives if not largely inauthentic ones.
Rating: 
Summary: get a life and pass on half a life.
Review: I expected this book to be much better written. The author dwells on the obvious. The struggle for the protagonist to grow beyond his very limited background is only touched upon in a limited way. The writing is not intelligent or clever. The characters are flat. The historical background is superficial and leaves the reader wanting to know more about the historical setting and timeline. At best, this should have been a short story.
Rating:
Summary: Deciphering Naipaul
Review: I've read two books by V.S. Naipaul: Miguel Street and Half a Life. He has a raw, direct style that you rarely find in modern authors that tend to be more polished and antiseptic. His style is similar to that of Caribbean newspapers, which is unsurprising because both he and his father wrote for newspapers in Trinidad. There is a lot of discussion of Naipaul because it's very difficult to decipher what he is writing about. That his books are autobiographical is clear enough in that the main character follows a path similar to that of Naipaul's actual life. What isn't discussed as much is his emphasis on race and social class and its impact on the main character. What this book is really about is the profound alienation of the main character. He cannot find a place for himself in the world. In fact, the book ends this way, with him telling his wife that he had lived her life long enough and now it is time to live his own. Again, this may be a reflection of the author's own experience having immigrated to England from Trinidad, being both inside and outside of a culture.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Place to Start
Review: Naipul is now one of my favorite writers and Half a Life was his first book that I read. I recommend it highly
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