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Half A life
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.
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The Mimic Men
Born of Indian heritage and raised on a British-dependent Caribbean island, Ralph Singh has retired to suburban London, writing his memoirs as a means to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the paradox of his childhood during which he secretly fantasized about a heroic India, yet changed his name from Ranjit Kripalsingh. As he assesses his short-lived marriage to an ostentatious white woman, Singh realizes what has kept him from becoming a proper Englishman. But it is the return home and his subsequent immersion in the roiling political atmosphere of a newly self-governed nation that ultimately provide Singh with the necessary insight to discover the crux of his disillusionment.
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Magic Seeds
Willy Chandra - whom we first meet in 'Half a Life' - succumbs to the demanding encouragement of his sister and joins an underground movement in India ostensibly devoted to unfettering the lower castes. After several years in prison, he returns to England where he comes to see himself as a man.
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The Enigma of Arrival
The story of a writer’s singular journey –from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another- this is perhaps Naipaul’s most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.