Co-incidentally this book came in the same year when Mr. Naipul received his Nobel.
Coming to the book, I really did not find it interesting at all. If it was not for Mr. Naipul and his accolades, I would not have continued or even picked up this one.
The title "Half a Life" made me think it was some sci-fi technical kind of stuff, though that thought was for just few seconds.
The story started with a conversation of an upper caste brahmin father and his son in some part of the newly independent India. The discussion was on the rationality of the son' middle name being borrowed from the famous and respected writer of all times, Mr. Somerset Maugham. The reason behind keeping the name was that the father attributed his career and standing in the society to the writer who had penned about the father in his writings.
The father had gone on the path of abjection by sacrificing everything in his life, as a means of following the trajectory of Mahatma. He even went on to drop out of his college and married a woman from the down castes.
Though father wished his son to follow the same path, but the son had his own sellf-interested ways of living his life and he ends up studying in London with the aid of some influence from one of his father's acquaintances'.
Then the entire story moves from an Indian village to London, moving from there to Africa and finally ends up in Charlottenburg, somewhere in Berlin. The entire novel moves around stories, stories that the protagonist Willie keeps telling to his sister in Germany about how he lives his life from London to Africa finding refuge in various women for companionship, money and of course the physical comforts; and then finally abandoning them once his self interests are fulfilled.
Mr. Naipaul's writing ideology about women in this particular book is no different from the various statements he has made about women in the media. Hence, his writing considering women as people to be used merely for benefits did not come as a surprise to me.
My only connect with the book was the fact that somewhere it mocked women who wear socks under their saris...That is something I have also find queer,a and I was surprised to see the writer also thinking the same.
Overall the descriptions and the vivid detailing of the colonial times in India and Africa was simple and beautiful. The entire narration also stuck to its title, "Half a Life" to the "T". The writer kept stressing all about his misfitting life full of his half-hearted living, broken desires, half-hatreds and under-achievements.
May be I need to read more of his craft to discover more from him.
