Born the wrong way into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen, Mohun Biswas has spent his 46 years striving for independence. Shuttled from one residence to another after his father's death, and married into the domineering Tulsi family, he longs for a place of his own.
In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul has produced his finest novel to date, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity. The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portugese colony in East Africa, wh... continue