I have to start by saying that the only reason I picked up this book was because of the little round gold sticker on the book that caught my eye and which read: Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature. How fascinating I thought, seized by an emotion not far from euphoria. The only other Indian writer that I knew of that has received this accolade was Rabindranath Tagore. I simply adore Tagore. And now, it appears that here is an equal. Someone who must surely be as good as Tagore and Hemingway to be able to share their privilege of having a Nobel prize bestowed upon him. Without another thought, I eagerly snapped up the book and started reading it that very evening.

Half a Life details the first four decades of the life of William Somerset Chandran. We are told about his father who, besotted by the preaching of Mahatma Gandhi, is determined make his sacrifices for his Motherland. This, he does by "marrying the lowest person he could find": an untouchable woman from the backward classes. Of course, he loathes this woman, cannot bear it when she asserts rights and houses her in a little room where he visits her occasionally.

To his disgust (possibly out of the realization that he obviously made love to this woman, his wife), he learns that she is pregnant by him. This happens not once but twice. He is revolted by her pregnancy which stems from his hatred about everything 'backward' that she represents. Naipal writes, speaking for the character ""That pregnancy, that distending of her stomach, that alteration of her already unattractive body, tormented me, made me pray that what I was witnessing wasn't there."

And into this house, William Somerset Chandran (Willie) is born. If the book could be described as mildly interesting up to this point it get laborious from hereon. The book is about nothing really, just a collection of thoughts and milestones in Willie's life. The tone of the book is bitter and angry. Angry about the evident caste systems in India, bitter about the more subtle class distinctions in Britain (where Willie moves to when he is 20 years of age) and frustrated with the residual colonialism in Africa.

Throughout the book we are exposed to Willie's feelings of frustration as he tries to fit in. At home, in India, he was shunned by the 'high caste' and never really accepted as a 'low caste'. In London, Willie writes for the BBC and that brings him some fame but he struggles still to find a group of persons, a place where he feels he rightly belongs.

Then he meets Ana, a young woman from Portuguese East Africa. They get married and emigrate to Ana's homeland (an unnamed country in Africa). In Africa, he confronts colonialism and continues to fight the isolation he feels. He stays in Africa for eighteen years and not one of them give him the sense of belonging he needs. He finds solace in the arms of another married woman, Graca, with whom he has an affair. And then one morning, he tells Ana he's decided to divorce her and leave Africa, and then finds his way to his semi-estranged sister in Germany. He leaves abruptly with nothing.

And that, gentle reader, is pretty much how the book ends too: Abruptly and leaving you with nothing. Willie is now in his forties and his fate and future can be as interesting or deploring as your imagination can make it out to be. It is almost as if the writer ran out of ideas about the same time that you ran out of patience.

Is this perhaps why the book is called half a life? Because we are taken on a journey, asked to live vicariously, 41 years of the life of William Somerset Chandra? Or is it because the book gives an insight into the feeling of desperation and anger that Willie experiences, feeling of being neither here nor there and about his inability to live a complete, full life?

If there is a method to the madness of writing a book that is so unsatisfying, if there is a purpose to this deliberate shabby writing then it escapes me. I have not read any of Naipal's previous works but I could not reconcile myself to the fact that the writer of this book was actually awarded a Nobel prize for literature. It left me very unsettled and disconcerted, to say the least. I decided to find out what exactly the Nobel Prize was awarded to him for and I found this:

"for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories'' .

Oh well, that made me feel a little bit better. I know why Tagore was given his Nobel prize, it was:

"because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with comsummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West."

Naipaul is no Tagore or even Hemingway. Also, my initial euphoria over his getting a nobel prize and him being Indian was quite unmerited. Not once, has Mr. Naipaul ever claimed himself to be an Indian. He was born in Trinidad in 1932. That said, he's also not an Englishman and he has always insisted that he doesn't feel Trinidadian either. He's always occupied no-man's land in so far as his identity goes and maybe that is what the book Half a Life is all about, in the end.

It is about Naipaul's own struggles. A camouflaged autobiography of sorts about his own trials and tribulations in all those very countries that he writes about in his book: India, UK, and Africa. After all, like Willie, Naipaul too, as a child, shared a love-hate relationship with his father, then studied literature at Oxford and was a writer for BBC and has spent extensive time in post colonial countries.

I haven't read any of Naipaul's other works. "Half a Life" has received mixed reviews: some showering unreserved praises and adulation while others, like me, showing skepticism and reserve.