One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly unexpected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago. Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer—strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her—carried along, really—to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own. In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man’s determined refusal of what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, Half a Life is an indelible feat of the imagination.

This collection brings together interviews from a thirty-six-year span and reveals a witty, sometimes scathing talker with a free-ranging curiosity. In early interviews, mostly given to such fellow writers and colleagues as Derek Walcott and Eric Roach, Naipul is clipped, brusque, and clearly impatient with interviewers. More recent interviews, given primarily to journalists rather than literary figures, reveal a more mellow Naipaul, often warm, passionate, and forthcoming about his private life.

Starting with the social and psychological side of the person Naipaul, one can summarise some reasonably simple discoveries that can be extracted from both his autobiographical pieces and his seemingly fictional books, published within a period of more than fifty years. Naipaul suggested that the way to approach the author is not through finding out as much as possible about the man and one could easily argue that the idea shall simply be used in conversion. One can learn more about the person when taking into account all that has been produced by the author, who is part of the person. By this means, one can extract valuable information about both person and author and thus can easily uncover some mysteries that have been established by the author/person to conceal the reality behind a fixed idea that has always played a significant role in Naipaul's life. Having studied English, Naipaul was aware of all the tools available and of the aims of literary critics and seems to have challenged these established routes for his own sake and to serve his purpose.

V.S. Naipaul stands as the most lionized literary mediator between First and Third World experience and is ordinarily viewed as possessing a unique authority on the subject of cross-cultural relations in the post-colonial era. In contesting this orthodox reading of his work, Nixon argues that Naipaul is more than simply an unduly influential writer. He has become a regressive Western institution, articulating a set of values that perpetuates political interests and representational modes that have their origin in the high imperial age. Nixon uses Naipaul's travel writing to probe the core theoretical issues raised by cross-cultural representation along metropolitan-periphery lines. With reference to economic theories of dependency, he critiques the vision, popularized by Naipaul, of the post-colonial world as divided between mimic and parasitic Third World nations on the one hand and, on the other, the benignly creative societies of the West.