Language | English |
---|---|
ISBN-10 | 0-330-48517-2 |
ISBN-13 | 978-0330485173 |
No of pages | 227 |
Font Size | Medium |
Book Publisher | Picador |
Published Date | 23 Aug 2002 |
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul 17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018, most commonly known as V. S. Naipaul, and informally, Vida Naipaul, was a Trinidadian and Tobagonian British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English.
He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels.
He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years.
Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State. In 1989, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honor.
He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and in 2001, the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the late 19th century, Naipaul's grandparents had emigrated from India to work in Trinidad's plantations as indentured servants.
His breakthrough novel A House for Mr. Biswas was published in 1961. On the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, he dedicated it to Patricia Anne Hale, to whom he was married from 1955 until her death in 1996, and who had served as first reader, editor, and critic of his writings.
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In Half a Life we are introduced to the compelling figure of Willie Chandran. Springing from the unhappy union of a low-caste mother and a father constantly at odds with life, Willie is naively eager to find something that will place him both in and apart from the world.
Drawn to England, and to the immigrant and bohemian communities of post-war London, it is only in his first experience of love that he finally senses the possibility of fulfilment.
In its humorous and sensitive vision of the half-lives quietly lived out at the centre of our world, V.S. Naipaul's graceful novel brings its own unique illumination to essential aspects of our shared history. `The best novel I have read this year . . .
the prose is crystalline and seductively so - you hardly realize that you are consuming a work of genius until you are plunged deep into a dramatic story which stretches across three continents' Antonia Fraser, Irish Times `A small masterpiece and a potent distillation of the author's work to date.
Mr Naipaul endows his story with the heightened power of fable' Michiko Kakatuni, New York Times `A brilliant, withering story of the bitter consequences of empire . . . Writing with a degree of wit and subtlety beyond the grasp of most writers, Naipaul has built a bleak world of discomfort and yearning from which, paradoxically,
the reader will not want to escape' Jeremy Poolman, Daily Mail `Parts are as sly and funny as anything Naipaul has written. Nobody who enjoys seeing English beautifully controlled should miss this novel' John Carey, Sunday Times