Half Life

by Roopa Farooki

Book Overview

From the author of Corner Shop and Bitter Sweets comes a luminous new novel about one woman's journey back home - to a past she once wanted only to forget.

"It's time to stop fighting, and go home."

Those were the words, written by a minor but well-reputed Bengali poet, that finally persuaded Aruna Ahmed Jones to exit her ground-floor Victorian flat wearing only jeans and a t-shirt, carrying nothing more...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312577915
• ISBN13: 9780312577919
• Release Date: July 2011
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

"...running away really is the easy part; it is coming home that is hard"

"...running away really is the easy part; it is coming home that is hard" Aruna Ahmed Jones just picks up and leaves her London apartment, her job, her material possessions, and her husband. Because it is time to face what she ran away from: the man she loved, Jazz Ahsan, and the secret of her past. I Liked: I read mostly science fiction, fantasy and mystery. But I couldn't help but be intrigued by the premise of this book (especially after watching the fantastic Slumdog Millionaire). And this isn't one of those books that promises the world and leaves us with pebbles and salt. Roopa Farooki delivers. The cast is small, but each character plays a unique, varied role. We focus on three primary characters: Aruna, Jazz, and a former poet, Hari Hassan. All three are unique, rich, and well-developed. Aruna is our primary protagonist, the woman who leaves her life in London (and her husband, Patrick) to return to Singapore and the life she ran away from. It is easy to sympathize with her plight, to feel her emotions (which she relays with stunning clarity and unashamed candor), and to journey with her on this emotional roller coaster ride. Jazz is our secondary protagonist, the former lover of Aruna. I enjoyed learning how he lived his life in Aruna's absence, how caring he was to her, how he wastes his time in a loveless relationship to a shallow woman. Lastly is Hari Hassan. I was dumbstruck at how different he was, yet he was interesting and complicated as well. It was a unique move of Farooki to make him hospitalized (at least, I've not read many books with this development), so I was impressed and torn at his helplessness, at his lack of privacy, and at his slowly deteriorating condition. The minor characters--Anwar, June, Patrick--likewise make their mark in this book, be it small or large. Anwar was a delightful character, fun but more than just that. June is completely self-centered. Her life is herself and she won't let anyone else move to the forefront. Her character gives us definite insights into Jazz and why he would choose a woman so different from Aruna. Lastly is the caring British doctor, husband of Aruna, Patrick. This guy is winsome, loving, caring. We feel Aruna's anguish as he reaches out for her, but her bruised heart just can't take his kindness. The plot is full of twists and turns, but I promise, I will make this review spoiler-free. But I will say that Farooki stunned me. Who knew that a woman's journey to re-find herself could be so interesting, could be written in such a way that it has thrilled me more than many of the so-called "thrillers" I have read? Sure, I guessed a few surprises, but in some ways, they left me more interested to see how they connected than to make me bored. Farooki uses third person present to relay the story in "present" time and third person past to relay the story in "past" time. Normally, this would completely flop. I've read so many books that have used this awkwardly, w

Loving Your Other Half

Half Life follows Rooney, a thirty something Pakistani woman who was raised in Singapore but now lives in London. Rooney is in a marriage where she purposefully keeps herself emotionally unavailable, and self medicates with alcohol and drugs. Slowly, the author uncovers that Rooney's strange behavior is tied to her past in Singapore, where she was in love with Jazz, a man who turned out to be a lot closer than she thought. As Rooney unravels her past, she must come to terms with who she really is. Half Life was a hard book to get into, it did not grab me right away. But once Rooney leaves London and arrives in Singapore to settle up with her past, the book had me. The author does a wonderful job of slowly unfolding Rooney's history, with both flashbacks to her childhood, her earlier, happier life with Jazz, and her troubled marriage in London. The characters in Half Life are much deeper than the shallow people they seem upon first impression, and in the end their interactions really made me think about how hard it is to recover when your life is shattered. If you're a fan of literary fiction, this is a good book to check out.

Emotionally compelling treatment of a taboo subject

I sat down with this book yesterday, intending to read just a few pages, and found myself unable to put it down. Though at first I was uncertain about Roooney and Jazz, as the novel progressed I grew to understand them and their unique and troubling situation. I thought the author's handling of the sensitive subject matter was masterful, and appreciated that she let the truth build slowly, revealing itself only gradually (both to the reader and to the main characters). The prose flowed freely, and did an excellent job of capturing the essence of the shifting locales. Both Rooney and Jazz grew emotionally throughout the novel, and I found the ending quite satisfying and realistic. This book was not what I expected, but quickly became more than I could have hoped. Highly recommended!

Simply Stunning

I've been a fan of Roopa Farooki since her debut novel, Bitter Sweets, and thought that she may have peaked with her last one, The Way Things Look To Me, which was a Times Top 50 Paperback last year, and recently longlisted for this year's Orange Prize. But Roopa Farooki continues to delight and surprise, as Half Life, her fourth novel, is her best yet, and is a simply stunning piece of fiction and a delight to review. It's probably her most literary work, but reads like a page-turning thriller - there is nothing spare in this novel, and in an intensely gripping love story, Farooki covers deep issues of war, psychological breakdown, terminal illness, addiction but also lifelong friendship, true love and the search for home. She's been compared to Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri, and in this novel, you can see the comparison. A novel that demands to be read.

Frank Mosaic

Without bothering to leave a note or pack a bag, Aruna leaves her life, work, and English husband in London and returns to the world she fled among Bengali immigrants in Singapore. Jazz, Aruna's former lover, is astonished to receive her call, and angered at how casually she upsets his carefully rebuilt life. But both of them have questions, and only the poet Hassan, slowly dying in Kuala Lumpur, can give them the answers they need. Roopa Farooki's third novel owes an obvious debt to authors like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie, but doesn't merely copy them. She is a new and coming generation of postcolonial literature, one less interested in the lingering damage of empire and more on the ways people wound one another in a fractured world. Her examination of the intense sexual politics in the expatriate community is harrowing even as she affirms her characters' central humanity. Farooki creates a world of intersecting secrets, some of which are not terribly well concealed, and how their exposure could rock individuals' worlds. Though Aruna claims to pine for Asian frankness as opposed to English politesse, she returns to a world of etiquette so intricate that it would take only one person speaking the truth to bring the edifice down around everyone's ears. Hers is a difficult, beautiful, and shockingly pitiless world. The story unfolds forward and back at once. Though only two days pass between the opening and closing scenes, sixty years of personal and world history unfolds incrementally through the narrative. As is common in such literature, careful attention is mandatory, because the story does not slot together with the neatness of pulp fiction. But it paints a mosaic world of subtle experience and bold declaration that stays with you long after the final page. "Half Life" is a difficult, bold, blunt, enlivening novel of people pushed beyond the world they know and forced to survive. It takes you past the limits of comfort, purges your expectations, and returns you to a world of tough resolutions. It may not take long to read, but it is not easy to forget once you close the covers. It has a power I don't see often enough in current literature, and it reminds me why I believe in reading.