International acclaim for V. S. NAIPAUL and
Half a Life
“Stunning…. Brilliant…. A story of remarkable economy…. Naipaul writes with the haunting efficiency of an ancient legend … powerful and unsettling.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“A superb exercise, in miniature, of Mr. Naipaul's finest gift, a revelation of history's disastrous impact on private life.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“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, The New York Review of Books
“Full of memorable passages that astonish by their economy and precision…. Naipaul has clearly not lost his gift … of summing up the sights and smells of a place within a few sentences. His powers as a shrewd observer communicate themselves strongly.”
—The Boston Globe
“As sly and funny as anything Naipaul has written…. Nobody who enjoys seeing English beautifully controlled should miss this novel.”
—Sunday Times (London)
“Brilliant…. Profoundly intimate…. Naipaul is a magical storyteller…. He weaves a complex, nuanced tapestry of colonial and postcolonial character and attitudes, of radical notions and movements, of the immense mysteriousness of singular personal identity. Naipaul, at the peak of his powers, never wastes a word. Half a Life affirms the wisdom of the Swedish Academy. It's a humane book, full of courage, wisdom and memorable reading.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“Magnificent…. With deft, elliptical plotting, Half a Life evokes the draining cost of [a rootless] way of living…. [It consists] of several journeys woven brilliantly into a larger, more restless spiritual one [and] offers a string of gemlike moments, ones where the intricate latticework of colonial identity rises up and makes itself brutally and indelibly felt.”
—Dallas Morning News
“Half a Life confirms Naipaul's stature as the greatest living analyst of the colonial and postcolonial dilemma. Those who have never approved of that analysis, and have objected over the years to what they see as Naipaul's fatalism, snobbery or even racism, may find in this book the surprise of a submerged radicalism, a willingness to see things from the eyes of the disadvantaged.”
—James Wood, The New Statesman
