When V.S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature earlier this year, the committee praised the Trinidad-born, London-based author for his skills as an "annalist of the destinies of empires… grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten (about) the history of the vanquished," and added that he "transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony… The customary distinctions between fiction and non-fiction are of subordinate importance." Naipaul's first post-Nobel novel, Half A Life, almost seems designed to back those claims. The book consists of three sustained, consecutive narratives, each told from a different point of view and each concerning an expatriate Indian writer named Willie Somerset Chandran. Half A Life opens with Willie's father telling his son about his activist college days in the '30s, following Mahatma Gandhi in silent, non-violent protest of British governance, and impressing visiting Englishmen with his resolve. Half A Life's second section contains a third-person account of Willie's emigration to London in the '50s, when citizens of the far-flung and crumbling British empire briefly became figures of fascination among British bohemians. Naipaul's reputation for historical detail plays out in lengthy descriptions of parties and conversations, which frame Willie's gradual revelation that he's not committed enough to his writing talent. Then the protagonist meets a half-Portuguese, half-African woman named Ana, and when he decides to follow her back to her home in an unnamed African country, Naipaul abruptly abandons his static plotting with this jarring sentence: "He stayed for eighteen years." The final passages of Half A Life are in Willie's voice, as he fills in that nearly two-decade gap spent idling on lavish estates in the middle of nowhere, waiting for ouster by whatever band of revolutionaries would eventually wrest power from the Portuguese colonists. Covering a long span of time in about 70 pages, Naipaul piles on the numbing particulars of depraved colonialism—most centered on the exploitation of natives through prostitution and wage slavery—as filtered through the eyes of a man who moved from an occupied country to become an occupier. It's possible that the characters in Half A Life are all intended as metaphorical; they could be embodiments of the uncertainty and low self-esteem that infects a culture whose development is interrupted by powerful outsiders. More likely, the author is entranced by the eras he's recreating, and focused on getting inside them with little or no contemporary bias. In exquisite, exactingly crafted prose, Naipaul brings characters together and then sets them adrift, building to a quiet moment when Willie and Ana, two world travelers estranged from the very idea of "home," come to the mutual revelation that their vitality has been spent in avoiding struggle.