Word: chandran
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...danger of prosecution, the upstart takes cover as a mute beggar. A touring W. Somerset Maugham is impressed by this bogus act of mystical piety and is inspired to write his best selling novel, The Razor's Edge. The faker becomes a celebrity and names his son Willie Somerset Chandran...
...grander," writes Naipaul, "and this made him feel, in a small part of his heart, that the Kings and Queens of England were impostors." London's doors do not open easily. Attempts to contact his famous namesake are all met with the same brief note: "Dear Willie Chandran, It was nice getting your letter. I have very nice memories of India, and it is always nice hearing from Indian friends. Yours very sincerely...
...Young Willie, like his father, is shrewd enough to the know the power of keeping his mouth shut. But he lacks the confident self-awareness to make things click. So it's surprising and not too convincing when Chandran turns out to have writing talent. He contributes scripts to the BBC and eventually publishes a collection of stories about India. Up to this point, aspects of Willie's life and early career are similar to those of Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent who took a degree at Oxford, worked for the BBC and wrote fiction. Unlike his protagonist, Naipaul...
...Naipaul has written about defeated men before. But they usually went down with a misguided or ill-fated passion. Willie Chandran simply drifts, usually from woman to woman, in a state of incompleteness. Fortunately, he is a continental drifter who allows Naipaul to revisit familiar ground and again bring to bear his formidable powers as a literary man and journalist. The two disciplines are indistinguishable in Half a Life. But there are clear influences. Naipaul's India could be a setting in an R.K. Nayaran story. His Africa is as baleful as Conrad's and his London Waugh-like. Here...
Naipaul’s latest novel, the thin, peculiar and effective Half a Life, goes some distance toward showing that the two spheres represented by his travelogues and his fiction are, for Naipaul, hardly separate. Half a Life’s protagonist, Willie Somerset Chandran, undergoes a series of life changes and geographic moves that illuminate how the colonial condition makes its subjects bury their own pasts, both personal and collective, as they adjust themselves to their native, colonial and adoptive homelands...