Half a Life (Willie Chandran #1)
V.S. Naipaul
Rated: 3.19 of 5 stars
3.19
· 16 ratings · 240 pages · Published: 01 Apr 2001
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portugese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray. Brilliantly orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul's career.
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The 'Willie Chandran' series
3.15 · 26 ratings
historical-fiction · audiobook · adult · literary-fiction · book · psychological · fiction · action-adventure · epic · literary · 20th-century · 21st-century · contemporary · journey · historical · realistic · politics · victorian · industrial-era · colonization
Willie Chandran reading order and complete book list ❯