half a life, VS Naipaul

next up on the world book tour: Half a Life, by V. S. Naipaul

Willie Chandran is the offspring of a brahmin and an untouchable in India, and is forever plagued by his cross caste birth and the uncertainty. A class criticism across three continents, Willie witnesses the system from the outside, inside and the top (in India, Britain, and Mozambique).

This overt class determinism is something I don't understand, since our class conflicts are mostly invisible--glass ceilings and walls. Or maybe because I've never been on the outside or underside, just in the amorphous middle (think THX-1138), the boundaries seem porous, and something that can be swept away with self determinism. It isn't part of my DNA the way it is with Willie.

On a college scholarship in London, Willie recreates his past, and carves out a new identity, but as the curtain closes on his college career, he discards this fanciful, inchoate persona of ex pat writer, and falls into the arms of someone who, with her own mixed class birth, would understand and coddle the original, conflicted Willie. Maybe he is attracted to her because she knows he is a fraud, or more charitably, can see through the protective shell he's built up. She punctures his panoply, and he steps away from the threshold of freedom, back into the trap of his birth. When he finally decides to chart his own course, he's 41 and starting over. He has been cowed, a coward, blown by the wind whichever direction seems to lead toward security, but it has stunted his growth. So I wouldn't say his chances are good.

The writing is crisp, sharp, spare and able to sketch out three societies and a broad roster of characters in just over 200 pages. I would love to read the other half of his life. Maybe Naipaul has written it.