000			01195nam a2200181 4500
010			_a2001033730
020			_a9780375707285
024			_a50821933
050			_aPR9272.9.N32
082			_a823.914
100	1		_aV.S. Naipaul
245	1		_aHalf a Life
260			_bVintage
300			_a224 pages
520			_aIn a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul has produced his finest novel to date, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity.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.
650			_aHistorical Fiction
999			_c2460 _d2460