Half a Life by V.S. Naipaul

Half a Life by V.S. NaipaulIn 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

or might create

a then-anonymous internet Agony Aunt

but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood

edited with an introduction and notes by Colin Burrow in Penguin Classics

Pietro meets Bruno

Osho is an Indian mystic

she was arrested in her hotel room on the Champs Elysees

It was like tasting for the first time

Powerful and engrossing

face an army that intends to keep them away from the White Tower

Should individuals be motivated by a desire for personal power and prestige

But to describe the novel in its plot is to do its originality no justice