Description

In a story that goes with dreamlike speed from India to England to Africa, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul has created his best book to-date, a bleakly resounding research of the deceptive deals which make up an identity.The child of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste partner, Willie Chandran develops up realizing the hollowness at the core of his dadis self-rejection and vowing to reside more authentically. That research takes him to the immigrant and fictional bohemias of 1950s London, to some facile and unsatisfying job as a writer, and finally into a rotting Portuguese community in East Africa, where he discovers a joy he'll then be required to betray.