Advertisement
 
YOU ARE HERE: LAT HomeCollectionsLife
(Page 3 of 3)

The Riddle of Identity

Preserving the Idea of Freedom Despite the Weight of History

HALF A LIFE A Novel; By V.S. Naipaul; Alfred A. Knopf: 216 pp., $24

October 21, 2001|LEE SIEGEL | Lee Siegel is a contributing writer to Book Review and a contributing editor to Harper's and The New Republic

For Willie ends by telling his story to his sister Sarojini, who has inherited his mother's backwardness and has always repelled him. He joins her in Germany, where she lives with her husband, a German revolutionary. In other words, he is to some extent repeating his father's experience with a "backward" spouse, the niece of a revolutionary, and reliving the alien life his father found himself in with her.

And Willie is relating his story to his sister, just as his father told his story to his son. Yet Willie is telling his own story, in his own voice. Yet it is a story about how he did not live his own life. Yet he has lived only the first half of his life, though the beginning of the second half of his life finds him in a situation similar to his father's. Yet the father's namelessness signifies both a determining influence and a harmless cipher. And although the story that Willie recites to Sarojini concludes with Willie's declaration to Ana that he is tired of living her life, he is, after all, telling it to Sarojini in Germany and very far from living his own life.

The ironies in "Half a Life" wind like a fugue into infinity, away from those colonial and postcolonial conditions that dog Willie's existence. The novel gently swells to such a chord of mystery and tentativeness that it is as if Naipaul wants to say that there can be no resolution of identity, but that the perception of the riddle of identity, as it unfolds through intimate relations in the present moment, discernible to the open mind, is a potent freedom. Life's meaning lies in the way its meaning never ends.

"How can anyone say who he is?" asks Graca, who suddenly strikes the still comically myopic Willie as insane. He looks at her and thinks, "I was making love to a deranged woman." As usual, he is half right. To recognize that identity is an enigma is a cause of derangement but also a mark of sanity. To make that sentiment breathe in the mouth of a living character, and then rise from the page with silent laughter, is a beautiful completion: the mark of a genius and a cause of unending delight.

Advertisement
Los Angeles Times Articles
|
|
|