Mikhail Zavalov. Half-book

Half a Life

In the original, the title of the novel: Half a Life is more ambivalent. It reads both as " half life " and as "half life". (This is not a criticism of the translator, who had to choose one of the two: the translation itself is quite good.) The hero of the novel, Willy Chandran, lives to be 40-something years old by the end of the book, and then the narrative ends, as it were, with an open continuation: “ The best part of my life is already behind me, and I haven’t done anything yet ” (301).

Time: 40s - 60s of the twentieth century (with a backstory where the hero’s father talks about himself). The geography is extremely simple and understandable: India (40s) - London (50s) - Africa (60s). Although the novel is preceded by a strange warning: This book is fiction. The countries, eras and events described in it are not an exact copy of the real ones (5). Which sets us up for a parable and a suspicious attitude towards the place and circumstances of the action. In any case, India and Africa are described without colonial exoticism for the tourist reader. But with fascinating social realities.

And at the beginning there is a backstory: the hero’s father leaves the university (following Gandhi’s call, and also because he does not understand anything about English literature) and, hiding from persecution, accidentally becomes a revered saint, and at the same time, out of protest, marries a girl from a different caste, an untouchable . In my opinion, these are the best pages of the book. In particular, a parable about the meeting of East and West, about their mutual tragicomic misunderstanding. The father explains all this to his son Willie, who asked: “ Why is my middle name Somerset? ” The father tells how the “great writer” Somerset Maugham approaches him, remaining in silence near the temple :

- I know that you swore to silence. But could you write answers to a few questions I ask? “I didn’t nod or make any other gesture of agreement, but he asked his friend for a notepad and wrote in it in pencil: “Are you happy?” This question made sense to me, and I took a notepad and pencil and wrote with absolute sincerity: “Within my silence, I feel free. This is happiness.”

<...>

At the end of the conversation, I felt that I had passed the exam. I knew that word of our meeting would spread quite widely and that the attention shown to my person by the great writer would not allow the director and other officials to harm me. That's how it happened. As a matter of fact, the writer had not yet left, and they were already beginning to praise me.

<...>

...I never managed to leave my new role. At first it seemed to me that I had caught myself in a net. But very soon I became convinced that this role suited me . (48-49)

An imaginary saint, saving himself in silence, but by no means a deceiver, he honestly answers the writer that he feels free - from persecution.

The basic and banal themes of the novel are set here: identity, roots, soil, “where do I belong?” The author of the novel does not demonize the West, does not extol the East, but shows the absurdity and ambivalence of their meeting. The hero comes from a strange, horribly caste-biased Indian family. His father is a little saint and a little deceiver, cruel and not cruel to his family at the same time; The hero’s mother, from an untouchable caste, seems to her husband both inferior and equal: “ When baby Willie was born ,” the father says, “ I was worried about only one thing: how much he would look like an inferior person. Anyone looking at me bending over the baby would have decided that I look at this tiny creature with pride ..." (51). And the most amazing thing is that the father does not see any conflict in his position. Everything is in a low-key ambivalence.

In the father's story - and in my opinion, these are the best pages of the novel - everything that follows is set. Willie quietly despises his parents. He becomes fascinated by the West - and quickly becomes disillusioned, imagining a career as a Christian missionary who will be sent back to the Third World by his white brothers to preach Western culture. But he feels that he needs to move to another place:

“ That’s how it came to be that twenty-year-old Willie Chandran is a dropout student at a missionary school who has not the slightest idea of ​​what he wants (except for the desire to leave what he knew), but has very little idea of ​​the world located beyond that “What he knew (all these ideas boiled down to fantasies inspired by Hollywood films of the thirties and forties that were shown at the mission school) was to go to a distant European city ” (72).

He goes to London to continue to doubt who he is. A man without roots makes his journey - aimless, but not gloomy - through places and cultures. It is significant that doubts do not torment him too desperately. In general, the novel constantly maintains a good proportion of light and darkness, no sharp contrasts or flashes, which is what makes it all beautiful.

Fakes

In London, where he is sent to study at college, Willie moves among the immigrant, mostly non-white, bohemians of the 50s, writing scripts for radio programs for the BBC and writing short stories that are even published. Coming from a different culture, Willie is able to look at London life through the eyes of a child and an explorer. " Buckingham Palace disappointed Willie. He thought that the palace of the Maharajah in his home state was much more majestic and much more like a palace, and somewhere in the depths of his soul he had a vague impression that the English kings and queens were impostors, and all of them the country looks a little like a fake " (73-74). Let us remember the word “ fake ”; it is also the most important leitmotif of the semi-book.

The social dimension, or cultural anthropology, is an interesting aspect of the book, although it does not in itself make a novel. A lot of talented, sometimes funny, sometimes evil and grotesque descriptions, portraits, events. These two dimensions: parable and anthropology - sometimes interact well, sometimes diverge too much. Thus, in the London pages of Half-Life, the socio-anthropological clearly overshadows the parable. Willie explores the rules of another culture, all the time looking into books “for consultation.” And in a similar way, childishly, with the help of books and naive questions, he explores sex.

At the same time, caste and race constantly hang on him like a curse. He is always not exactly second-rate, but he is forced to doubt his right not to be second-rate. Only Willie himself does not notice this. In general, what admires me in this novel is the art of describing people who do not understand themselves and do not suffer too much from this misunderstanding.

So, the theme of deception and forgery (which is already present in the “holiness” of the hero’s father) develops further. Willie goes to the library to research the "ancient" English student traditions. It turns out that many of England's "ancient traditions" were invented quite recently. He comes to an important - liberating and sad - discovery about "roots" in general:

Gradually learning the quaint rules of life in this college, with its church-like Victorian buildings that looked older than they actually were, Willie began to look differently at the rules he had left at home. He began to understand (upsettingly at first) that the ancient rules of his country were also a kind of fake and people had imposed them on themselves. And one day, towards the end of the second semester, a clear realization came to him that these ancient rules no longer had power over him.

<...> None of those he met in college or outside of it knew the rules accepted in Willie’s homeland, and Willie began to realize that he could pretend to be anyone. He could, figuratively speaking, invent his own revolution. Dizzying prospects opened up before him. He could, within reason, remake himself, his past and his ancestors (83-84).

Willy, a spontaneous postmodernist, creatively invents his past; it is always not a lie, but a half-truth:

“ He left his father as a Brahmin. He made his father’s father a “courtier.” So, playing with words, he began to recreate himself. It was exciting and filled him with a sense of power.

His teachers said: “It looks like you are settling in a little . ” (85)

He writes stories from Indian life, retelling the plots of the Hollywood films he has watched and the trilogy about the childhood of Maxim Gorky. They are praised. They are published. He receives a letter from a half-Portuguese African woman, Ana, who recognizes her life in these stories. With this woman, he leaves for Africa, to her country, a Portuguese colony in the process of “liberation.” This is how he spends 18 years, which by all accounts should be happy, but are just a respite and end in nothing. Some years later, by the way, Ana admits that she was by no means deceived: “ Probably now you understand why your stories had such an effect on me. All this bluff, pretense, and behind them a truly unhappy life ” (209) .

Half a book

The thought comes to mind: isn’t the book itself a fake, isn’t it a deception? “ This book is fiction. The countries, eras and events described in it are not an exact copy of the real ones ” (5). That is why I soon, even on the first pages, wanted to know more about the author : where he comes from, whether he has been to India, how much the hero’s experiences and actions correspond to his experience, how reliable, finally, is the “anthropological” content of the novel - or is it all simple? a parable about freely imagined countries and people?

It turned out that the novel is almost autobiographical. The author was born in Trinidad to parents of Indian descent. He always wrote in English, was in India and Africa, settled in England - even received the honor of becoming a sir. Marked by political incorrectness, so there was no rush to win the Nobel Prize . In particular, he wrote a lot about the aggressive nature of Islam and about the emergence of fundamentalism from that very groundlessness against the backdrop of the post-colonial destruction of traditional ways. And “Half-Life” reminds us what kind of world we live in - complex, out of place, seeking refuge and not finding it.

That does not prevent the book from being a “fake” - in the spirit of Willy Chandran’s literary work. Sometimes it seems that the novel was simply written carelessly; other defects are striking. For example, the father's story about himself on the first pages is completely implausible in its sincerity; in general, there is an abundance of unmotivated actions among all the heroes - or is this a technique? Willy Chadran - this naive, unimaginative man - is extremely unconvincing as a writer. The main character is generally unlikable, incomprehensible and leaves you indifferent. All his women with whom he engages in sexual experiments that are tedious and “tasteless” for the reader are described just as coldly—that is, not evil, but without warmth. And the main “fake” is the abrupt ending. You catch yourself thinking that the Nobel laureate was tired of his own confusion, put an end to it and decided that it would do.

Or do you think this is a deliberate writer's trick? Then this is brilliant. It leaves bewilderment, which means it works. And it changes the picture of the world, where the East and the West have already become infected with a lethal disease from each other, where everything has already irreversibly moved from its place and hovered in a formidable - since it is incomprehensible - uncertainty...