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A masterpiece of implicitness . . . explicitly concerned withdrawing out the metaphysical-private while keeping it embedded insociety and history . . . The ironies in Half a Life windlike a fugue into infinity . . . Identity is an enigma . . . Tomake that sentiment breathe in the mouth of a living character, andthen rise from the page with silent laughter, is a beautifulcompletion: the mark of a genius and a cause of unending delight. ?Lee Siegel, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"As disquieting as anything [Naipaul] has ever written . . . Histerse prose works, as always, to imply a world in a phrase." ?Michael Gorra, New York Times Book Review

"A troubling novel, genuinely moving . . . disturbing in all theright ways . . . the scenes of social encounters are brilliant, setagainst the twilight of colonial rule . . . A stunning book, threecontinents, three journeys, the evergreen themes of caste andclass, of growing up." ? Betsy Willeford, Miami Herald

"Naipaul's style is so frank it seems intimate, and the awfulcharacters are studied and well crafted. Behind the matter-of-factstyle is a cuttingly ironic view of human relations . . . WhenNaipaul talks, we listen." ? Diane Mehta, The AtlanticMonthly

"Naipaul is a master of English prose, and the prose of Half aLife is as clean and cold as a knife." ? J. M. Coetzee, NewYork Review of Books

A masterpiece of implicitness . . . explicitly concerned with
drawing out the metaphysical-private while keeping it embedded in
society and history . . . The ironies in Half a Life wind
like a fugue into infinity . . . Identity is an enigma . . . To
make that sentiment breathe in the mouth of a living character, and
then rise from the page with silent laughter, is a beautiful
completion: the mark of a genius and a cause of unending delight. ?
Lee Siegel, Los Angeles Times Book Review 
 
"As disquieting as anything [Naipaul] has ever written . . . His
terse prose works, as always, to imply a world in a phrase." ?
Michael Gorra, New York Times Book Review 
"A troubling novel, genuinely moving . . . disturbing in all the
right ways . . . the scenes of social encounters are brilliant, set
against the twilight of colonial rule . . . A stunning book, three
continents, three journeys, the evergreen themes of caste and
class, of growing up." ? Betsy Willeford, Miami Herald 
 
"Naipaul's style is so frank it seems intimate, and the awful
characters are studied and well crafted. Behind the matter-of-fact
style is a cuttingly ironic view of human relations . . . When
Naipaul talks, we listen." ? Diane Mehta, The Atlantic
Monthly 
 
"Naipaul is a master of English prose, and the prose of Half a
Life is as clean and cold as a knife." ? J. M. Coetzee, New
York Review of Books 
 
"'Half a Life,' the fierce new novel by V. S. Naipaul, the new
Nobel laureate, is one of those rare books that stands as both a
small masterpiece in its own right and as a potent distillation of
the author's work to date . . . It deftly combines Dickensian
delight in character with political and social observation . . .
while recounting with uncommon elegance and acerbity the coming of
age of its hero, Willie Chandran ... Mr. Naipaul endows his story
with the heightened power of a fable. With 'Half a Life' he has
given us a powerful tale of one man's journey from childhood to
middle age while at the same time creating a resonant parable about
the convulsions of modern history, both the dying of old inequities
and the rise of new illusions, and their spiritual legacy of
homelessness and dislocation." ? Michiko Kakutani, New York
Times 
 "As sly and funny as anything Naipaul has written . . .
He is still mining his richest obsessions . . . The classic that
his new novel calls to mind is Voltaire's Candide. There is
the same mocking simplicity of style, the same heartless elegance
of design . . . Nobody who enjoys seeing English beautifully
controlled should miss this novel." ? John Carey, Sunday
Times 
 
"A surprise and a pleasure . . . here, at last, is a work of pure
imagination, though the themes are characteristic in their complex
peculiarity . . . Naipaul has produced the most complex and
demanding body of work of any post-war British writer . . . In
sentences of great precision and balance, Naipaul reanimates the
dilemmas of the late and post-colonial experience . . . He reminds
us again of what a fine and unusual writer he is . . . In the canon
of contemporary British writing he is without peer: a cold,
clear-eyed prophet, a scourge of sentimentality, irrationalism and
lazy left-liberal prejudices. Read him." ? Jason Cowley, The
Observer Review 
 
"Naipaul writes a prose as clean as a stripped wand, but however
plain the language, the ideas it delivers are not. . . . He is
still peerless as a deviser of the shocking icon. He builds a scene
of metaphysical loss as compelling as any Renaissance canvas of the
expulsion from paradise." ? Paula Burnett, The
Independent 
 
"No writer has written more tellingly about the vocation of writing
than V. S. Naipaul. . . . this new novel, Half a Life, shows
us that Naipaul's absorption in how he came to be a writer is still
fresh. . . . The pages about London glow, and bear comparison with
anything that Naipaul has done . . . Almost casually, but
beautifully, achieved . . . Captures in miniature the exceptional
trajectory of Naipaul's oeuvre-the figure of the father, the life
of the writer, and, finally, an enquiry into the origins of the
colonial landscape itself." ? Amit Chaudhuri, Times Literary
Supplement 
"The foremost literary interpreter of the third world for a British
and American readership." ? Maya Jaggi, The Guardian 
 
"Genuinely powerful in a deeply politically incorrect way." ?
Jonathan Bate, Daily Telegraph 
"Fresh . . . A novel with a purpose . . . Through the evocation of
three continents and several decades, without calling on public
events and purely through the narrative of a life, V. S. Naipaul
gives us a moral tale which captures the evanescence of our times."
? Farrukh Dhondy, Literary Review 
 
"Read it for its beautifully controlled English." ? The Sunday
Times 
 
"One of the world's greatest living novelists . . . A writer whose
world-view has been characterised by rigorous inquiry . . . A
fascinating study . . . Naipaul has thankfully lost none of his
grace, style, or storytelling power in this beautiful novel." ?
Stuart Price, Independent 
 
"Like a series of musical variations, the novel that follows [the
first lines] never departs from them in essence . . . This is
brilliant, affecting stuff: the novel's melancholy drama is played
out on the furthest margins of fiction, where things are
recollected rather than observed." ? Rachel Cusk, Evening
Standard 
 
"Naipaul's first novel in six years is another installment in the
extended fictional autobiography. . . . [This novel] may tell us
more about the essential Naipaul than he has ever heretofore
revealed. . . . The work of a master who has rarely, if ever,
written better." ? Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 
 
 
From the Hardcover edition. -- Review

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内容简介

In 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.

作者简介

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990. He lives in Wiltshire, England.

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HALF A LIFE(ISBN=9780375707285)

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