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Kathmandu Sunday November 25, 2001 Marga 10, 2058.
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A Canvas of Checkered Fulfillment
By Swarnim Waglé
Half A Life is a work on studied nonchalance to conformity, to this need of
self-respecting men across societies to pretend that life is going on fine when it’s
not, when to admit so is sacrilege, and a life of emptiness is continued to be led.
Naipaul deconstructs this educated culture through a talented character blessed and cursed
in equal measure by circumstances beyond his design. He gives public confessional of
under-performance a new sort of respectability by saying that awkward things do happen to
innocent people. He whispers this in a tone of devastating fatalism.
Naipaul’s writing is disarmingly transparent. His protagonist, William
Somerset Chandran, has an uncanny resemblance to the author himself. In 1956, Willie, son
of a Brahmin and a sister of an untouchable radical from a princely protectorate in India,
lands a scholarship at a London college, thanks to his father’s comical fame as the
man who attracted tourists by keeping a vow of silence. Willie finds the bohemian
atmosphere of the immigrant’s London in the 50s mildly liberating. He experiments
with sex, scorns his closest relations, especially his father, reads Hemingway, and gets
published. He then falls in love with Ana, an heiress to an African estate, and follows
her to a colony where they spend eighteen uneventful years. The country is unnamed, but
the overdone Portuguese pedigree and other clues give it away as Mozambique.
Willie’s career in the book is not illustrious. Certainly nothing like
the Naipaul we know today, an accomplished life adorned with the Bookers and the Nobels,
and a giant so tall that a reviewer in his country of adoption recently declared, "In
a canon of contemporary British writing, he is without peer." But casting everything
in settings that many who have researched his early career know have been visited by
Naipaul himself, Willie is the Naipaul who never became, but could easily have, given how
he himself portrays fate dragging complete lives of promise to mediocrity. If the
intention is to allow a convincing merger of honest reportage from a life that he knows
best with the invention of failure, the other life that he knows he partially avoided,
Naipaul succeeds. In Half A Life we have three distinct voices narrating happenings in
India, England, and Africa. It is the final section that is particularly joyous where, as
the Nobel citation puts it, Naipaul "unites perceptive narrative and incorruptible
scrutiny to compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."
There’s an awful lot of sex in the novel. Naipaul wants us to pick this
theme up because he writes about it with rare candor. Mostly, it is of the imprudent
variety: Willie tactlessly seducing women who belong to his friends, or sleeping with
insulting prostitutes in London and under-age girls with tight breasts in Mozambique.
Willie’s early years with Ana mark some pleasant discoveries, but it is only through
brazen infidelity at the age of 33 that he finds bliss in sex. One gets the impression
that Naipaul is almost angry that this should happen so late in life to good men. He finds
it unfair that those who shy away from experimentation at early ages because of guilt and
honor are never helped. As Willie says, "We are all born with sexual impulses, but we
are not all born with sexual skill, and there are no schools where we can be trained.
People like me have to fumble and stumble on as best as they can, and wait for accidents
to take them to something like knowledge." This sounds like Naipaul’s own
struggle to tame his urges as a foreign student at Oxford in the 50s, amidst a state of
suicidal depression, which he has admitted elsewhere.
Naipaul’s confessions of having visited prostitutes in London as a young
person and his scandalous philandering silently accommodated in a complex union to a loyal
wife of forty years are damningly portrayed in Sir Vidia’s Shadow by a friend turned
foe, Paul Theroux. It is not an accident that a character in the novel, self-described as
rich and white from Colombia, emerges to make an amusing statement, "My youngest
sister is married to an Argentine. When you have to look so far and so hard for a husband,
you can make mistakes." If Theroux’s unsubstantiated allegations are to be
believed, Naipaul has outrageously likened pregnant women to ugly sights. This is echoed
in the novel: "that alteration of her already unattractive body tormented me, made me
pray what I was witnessing wasn’t there." Lady Pat died some years ago without
mothering a Naipaul child. In the novel, Willie spends eighteen years with Ana, and yet
that predictable product of most normal marriages isn’t even mentioned. A painful
conversation occurs when a graceful Ana confronts an indifferent Willie about his
indiscretions. Even she isn’t spared the humiliation at the end.
The thematic repertoire of all Naipaulian works includes exile, alienation,
and the psychological ravages of a colonial aftermath. Born in a small town in a small
island on the periphery of the empire, Naipaul reflects movingly in The Enigma of Arrival,
and says he has no sense of belonging. He has rightly claimed the world as his subject of
inquiry. But both his fiction and the documentaries have largely drawn on lives that
remain what Thomas Hobbes in 1651 called, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short." Naipaul has not always been affectionate in portraying his peoples – the
Africans, the Indians, the Muslims; and this is where he has taken much flak from critics.
He just doesn’t give a damn about being correct and proper, especially on the
sensitive themes of race and identity. This is perhaps what distinguishes him from the
idle, pontificating Left. Naipaul is an author of precision who knows what he is saying
and why; he thinks, weighs, pauses, measures, and perfects every single sentence that he
writes. In his non-fiction, Naipaul usually sits back and lets his characters speak. In
novels, he takes charge and speaks through them. That this is common knowledge often makes
reading him a tragic experience. The parts where he is sorry for his father, parts where
he is sorry for himself, are brutally honest, and thus so very hard to bear.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul declared the novel form of narration dated
three years ago, foretelling that his next creation would introduce a new style. Half A
Life does this by ending without a climax, without a resolution, with Willie becoming
incorrigibly unfaithful, divorcing Ana, and flying to Germany to meet his sister Sarojini
whose own life across continents had been uninteresting despite spurts of promise.
Naipaul’s books apparently don’t sell well, not in big numbers. The marketplace
for his readership is diverse, but it is a skeptical crowd without a huge, loyal core. It
is easy to appreciate Naipaul because nobody writes like him. But to admire him, people
need to see in him a partial reflection of themselves, almost connect with his origin in a
humbled, ignored land, or his attempt to reconfigure his relation to his roots with the
luxury of distance and bemused detachment.
Recent Arrivals
LANDSLIDE HAZARD MITIGATION IN THE HINDU KUSH-HIMALAYAS (Kathmandu:
International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, 2001) edited by Li Tianchi,
Suresh Raj Chalise and Bishal Nath Upreti is a compilation of resource materials for
landslide hazard management and control. The book is a comprehensive reference manual
which provides information about a wide range of topics related to landslide development
and mitigation and assessment of risk. The first part of the book has 14 papers that deal
with the principles of investigation of landslide debris flows and the second part has 4
papers that deal with mitigation and management based on case studies in Nepal and China.
HEIR TO A SILENT SONG: TWO REBEL WOMEN OF NEPAL (Kathmandu: Centre for Nepal
and Asian Studies, 2001) by Barbara Nimri Aziz is the story of two rebellious
women—Yogmaya and Durga Devi. The two women were dissidents and had fought for
women’s rights as well as justice for the poor and low caste people. Yogmaya
advocated social reforms for equality for women whereas Durga Devi pursued court cases and
waged campaigns against corrupt and indolent bureaucrats in local district office. These
village women called for justice for their people long before the women’s rights and
civil rights movement in the West. Aziz digs out the life stories of the two deceased
rebellious Nepali
women in the book.
EMPOWERING THE OPPRESSED: GRASSROOTS ADVOCACY MOVEMENTS IN INDIA (New Delhi:
Sage Publications, 2001, IRs 225) by John G. Sommer introduces some two dozen unique
groups in India that have found effective ways to improve the lot of the poorest of the
poor. There are stories of the leaders of these exemplary groups in the book. The initial
chapters illustrate the situations these groups encounter, selected activities in which
they engage and accounts of how they carry them out. The final chapters deal with the
major issues raised by the groups; lessons learnt; analyzes the development approaches;
donors’ roles; etc.
ARISING VENUS AND INFINITE ASA (Kathmandu: Our Campaign ASA, 2000, NRs 30) by
Jayant Bikram Shah is a book containing a long but single poem. Divided into fifteen
chapters, the poem peeks at the situation of today’s world and at the same time the
author praises the campaign—Association of South Asia.
MARKET TOWNS IN THE HINDU KUSH-HIMALAYAS: TRENDS AND ISSUES (Kathmandu:
International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, 2001) edited by Pitamber Sharma
is a collection of papers on the state of market towns and their trends and issues in some
countries of the Hindu Kush Himalayan region.
NEPALI MEDIA MA DALIT TATHA JANJATI (Kathmandu: Ekta Books, 2001, NRs 125)
edited by Pratyoush Onta and Shekhar Parajuli is the outcome of national level research
conducted by the Centre for Social Research and Development to assess the representation
of Dalits and Janjatis in Nepali media—print as well as electronic. Pramod Bhatta and
Shekhar Parajuli have analyzed contents—news, features, articles—related to
Dalits and Janjatis in 3 national dailies, 17 weeklies and 5 magazines in the book.
Likewise, Chakraman Vishwokarma and Kumar Yatru have assessed radio programs that deal
with Dalits and Janjatis. Also included in the book are Pratyoush Onta's and CK Lal’s
articles related to Nepali media.
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