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Magic Seeds (Vintage International) Kindle Edition
“The most essential English-language novelist of our time.” —New York
Having left a wife and a livelihood in Africa, Willie is persuaded to return to his native India to join an underground movement on behalf of its oppressed lower castes. Instead he finds himself in the company of dilettantes and psychopaths, relentlessly hunted by police and spurned by the people he means to liberate. But this is only one stop in a quest for authenticity that takes in all the fanaticism and folly of the postmodern era. Moving with dreamlike swiftness from guerrilla encampment to prison cell, from the squalor of rural India to the glut and moral desolation of 1980s London, Magic Seeds is a novel of oracular power, dazzling in its economy and unblinking in its observations.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateFebruary 6, 2010
- File size2416 KB
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Review
—New York magazine
"A novel of careful craft … fresh ideas, unexpected turns."
—The Globe and Mail
"[Naipaul] is a modern master of the multiple ironies of resentment, the claustrophobia of the margins. In a world in which terrorism continually haunts the headlines, Naipaul’ s work is indispensable."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"When Naipaul talks, we listen."
—The Atlantic Monthly
Praise for Half a Life:
“Naipaul is a master of English prose and the prose of Half a Life is as clean and cold as a knife.”
—J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize
“Here, sentence by sentence, is the consummate craftsmanship, the perception, the precision, the style.”
—The Globe and Mail
From the Inside Flap
Abandoning a life he felt was not his own, Willie Chandran (the hero of Half a Life) moves to Berlin where his sister s radical political awakening inspires him to join a liberation movement in India. There, in the jungles and dirt-poor small villages, through months of secrecy and night marches, Willie a solitary, inward man discovers both the idealism and brutality of guerilla warfare. When he finally escapes the movement, he is imprisoned for the murder of three policemen. Released unexpectedly on condition he return to England, he attempts to climb back into life in the West, but his experience of wealth, love and despair in London only bedevils him further.
Magic Seeds is a moving tale of a man searching for his life and fearing he has wasted it, and a testing study of the conflicts between the rich and the poor, and the struggles within each. Its spare, elegant prose sizzles with devastating psychological analysis, bleak humour and astonishing characters. Only V. S. Naipaul could have written a novel so attuned to the world and so much a challenge to it.
From the Back Cover
Abandoning a life he felt was not his own, Willie Chandran (the hero of Half a Life) moves to Berlin where his sister's radical political awakening inspires him to join a liberation movement in India. There, in the jungles and dirt-poor small villages, through months of secrecy and night marches, Willie -- a solitary, inward man -- discovers both the idealism and brutality of guerilla warfare. When he finally escapes the movement, he is imprisoned for the murder of three policemen. Released unexpectedly on condition he return to England, he attempts to climb back into life in the West, but his experience of wealth, love and despair in London only bedevils him further.
Magic Seeds is a moving tale of a man searching for his life and fearing he has wasted it, and a testing study of the conflicts between the rich and the poor, and the struggles within each. Its spare, elegant prose sizzles with devastating psychological analysis, bleak humour and astonishing characters. Only V. S. Naipaul could have written a novel so attuned to the world and so much a challenge to it.
"From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.
In 1990, V.S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He died in 2018.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Willie said, "I know about the visa. I've been thinking about it."
Sarojini said, "I know your kind of thinking. It means putting something to the back of your mind."
Willie said, "I don't see what I can do. I don't know where I can go."
"You've never felt there was anything for you to do. You've never understood that men have to make the world for themselves."
"You're right."
"Don't talk to me like that. That's the way the oppressor class thinks. They've just got to sit tight, and the world will continue to be all right for them."
Willie said, "It doesn't help me when you twist things. You know very well what I mean. I feel a bad hand was dealt me. What could I have done in India? What could I have done in England in 1957 or 1958? Or in Africa?"
"Eighteen years in Africa. Your poor wife. She thought she was getting a man. She should have talked to me."
Willie said, "I was always someone on the outside. I still am. What can I do here in Berlin?"
"You were on the outside because you wanted to be. You've always preferred to hide. It's the colonial psychosis, the caste psychosis. You inherited it from your father. You were in Africa for eighteen years. There was a great guerrilla war there. Didn't you know?"
"It was always far away. It was a secret war, until the very end."
"It was a glorious war. At least in the beginning. When you think about it, it can bring tears to the eyes. A poor and helpless people, slaves in their own land, starting from scratch in every way. What did you do? Did you seek them out? Did you join them? Did you help them? That was a big enough cause to anyone looking for a cause. But no. You stayed in your estate house with your lovely little half-white wife and pulled the pillow over your ears and hoped that no bad black freedom Þghter was going to come in the night with a gun and heavy boots and frighten you."
"It wasn't like that, Sarojini. In my heart of hearts I was always on the Africans' side, but I didn't have a war to go to."
"If everybody had said that, there would never have been any revolution anywhere. We all have wars to go to."
They were in a café in the Knesebeckstrasse. In the winter it had been warm and steamy and civilized with its student waiters and waitresses and welcoming to Willie. Now in late summer it was stale and oppressive, its rituals too well known, a reminder to Willie-in spite of what Sarojini said-of time passing fruitlessly by, calling up the mysterious sonnet they had had to learn by heart in the mission school. And yet this time removed was summer's time . . .
A young Tamil man came in selling long-stemmed red roses. Sarojini made a small gesture with her hand and began to look in her bag. The Tamil came and held the roses to them, but his eyes made no contact with theirs. He claimed no kinship with them. He was self-possessed, the rose-seller, full of the idea of his own worth. Willie, not looking at the man's face, concentrating on his brown trousers (made by tailors far away) and the too-big gold-plated watch and wristlet (perhaps not really gold) on his hairy wrist, saw that in his own setting the rose-seller would have been someone of no account, someone unseeable. Here, in a setting which perhaps he understood as little as Willie did, a setting which perhaps he had not yet learned to see, he was like a man taken out of himself. He had become someone else.
Willie had met a man like that one day, some weeks before, when he had gone out on his own. He had stopped outside a South Indian restaurant, without customers, with a few þies crawling on the plate-glass windows above the potted plants and the display plates of rice and dosas, and with small amateurish-looking waiters (perhaps not really waiters, perhaps something else, perhaps electricians or accountants illegally arrived) lurking in the interior gloom against the cheap glitter of somebody's idea of oriental decoration. An Indian or Tamil man had come up to Willie then. Soft-bodied, but not fat, with a broad soft face, and with a þat grey cap marked with thin blue lines in a wide check pattern, like the "Kangol" golfer's caps that Willie remembered seeing advertised on the back pages of the early Penguin books: perhaps the style had come to the man from those old advertisements.
The man began to talk to Willie about the great guerrilla war to come. Willie was interested, even friendly. He liked the soft, smiling face. He was held by the þat cap. He liked the conspiratorial talk, the idea it carried of a world about to be astonished. But when the man began to talk of the great need for money, when this talk became insistent, Willie became worried, then frightened, and he began to back away from the restaurant window with the trapped, drowsy þies. And even while the man still appeared to smile there came from his soft lips a long and harsh and profound religious curse delivered in Tamil, which Willie still half understood, at the end of which the man's smile had gone and his face below the blue-checked golf cap had twisted into a terrible hate.
It unsettled Willie, the sudden use of Tamil, the ancient religious curse into which the man had put all his religious faith, the deep and abrupt hate, like a knife thrust. Willie didn't tell Sarojini about the meeting with this man. This habit of keeping things to himself had been with him since childhood, at home and at school; it had developed during his time in London, and had become an absolute part of his nature during the eighteen years he had spent in Africa, when he had had to hide so many obvious things from himself. He allowed people to tell him things he knew very well, and he did so not out of deviousness, not out of any settled plan, but out of a wish not to offend, to let things run on smoothly.
Sarojini, now, lay the rose beside her plate. She followed the rose-seller with her eyes as he walked between the tables. When he went out again she said to Willie, "I don't know what you feel about that man. But he is worth far more than you."
Willie said, "I'm sure."
"Don't irritate me. That smart way of talking may work with outsiders. It doesn't work with me. Do you know why that man is worth more than you? He has found his war. He could have hidden from it. He could have said he had other things to do. He could have said he had a life to live. He could have said, 'I'm in Berlin. It's cost me a lot to get here. All the false papers and visas and hiding. But now that's done. I've got away from home and all that I was. I will pretend to be part of this rich new place. I will watch television and get to know the foreign programmes and start to think that they are really mine. I will go to the KDW and eat at the restaurants. I will learn to drink whisky and wine, and soon I will be counting my money and driving my car and I will feel that I am like the people in the advertisements. I will Þnd that, really, it wasn't hard at all to change worlds, and I will feel that that was the way it was meant to be for all of us.' He could have thought in that false and shameful way. But he saw he had a war. Did you notice? He never looked at us. Of course he knew who we were. He knew we were close to him, but he looked down on us. He thought we were among the pretenders."
Willie said, "Perhaps he was ashamed, being a Tamil and selling roses to these people and being seen by us."
"He didn't look ashamed. He had the look of a man with a cause, the look of a man apart. It's something you might have noticed in Africa, if you had learned to look. This man's selling roses here, but those roses are being turned to guns somewhere else far away. It's how revolutions are made. I've been to some of their camps. Wolf and I are working on a Þlm about them. We'll soon be hearing a lot more about them. There is no more disciplined guerrilla army in the world. They are quite ferocious, quite ugly. And if you knew more about your own history you would understand what a miracle that is."
Another day, in the zoo, in the terrible smell of captive and idle wild animals, she said, "I have to talk to you about history. Otherwise you will think I am mad, like our mother's uncle. All the history you and people like you know about yourselves comes from a British textbook written by a nineteenth-century English inspector of schools in India called Roper Lethbridge. Did you know that? It was the Þrst big school history book in India, and it was published in the 1880s by the British Þrm of Macmillan. That makes it just twenty years or so after the Mutiny, and of course it was an imperialist work and it was also meant to make money. But it was also a work of some learning in the British way and it was a success. In all the centuries before in India there had been nothing like it, no system of education like that, no training in that kind of history. Roper Lethbridge went into many editions, and it gave us many of the ideas we still have about ourselves. One of the most important of those ideas was that in India there were servile races, people born to be slaves, and there were martial races. The martial races were &#...
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Product details
- ASIN : B0037BS2MW
- Publisher : Vintage; Reprint edition (February 6, 2010)
- Publication date : February 6, 2010
- Language : English
- File size : 2416 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 290 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,701,707 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,575 in Action & Adventure Literary Fiction
- #5,940 in Political Fiction (Books)
- #8,530 in Historical Literary Fiction
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2014GREAT
- Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2007"Magic Seeds" is the third book by V.S. Naipaul that I have read. I like his style and his observations on human society. However, I always get the sense that we are seeing the world through the eyes of a non-participant. In "Magic Seeds" we pick up where we left off in "Half a Life" with our impartial observer Willie involved in a variety of activities. They are all part of a search for purpose that seems misguided because he is taking his directions from others. Very seldom does he seem to find his own way in life yet it is his observations as a detached, unemotional observer that makes "Magic Seeds" and "Half a Life" such compelling novels.
I was rather puzzled by the experiences Willie had in India. I admit it was an unusual set of circumstances but that's where Willie's detachment became so frustrating. Why he didn't just walk away maybe says a lot about my naivite but it left me wondering how much I was willing to invest in such an otherwise keen insight. Despite what I said about Willie in India, I like the way Naipaul takes us to places we don't normally get to go. I'll be glad to read more of his books and maybe, somewhere along the way, I'll come across a character who actually cares about his life and surroundings. If not, I'll keep to my theory that Naipaul's greatness is his ability to let us see what life looks like when the world treats you as unimportant. For someone with an Asian heritage raised in the Carribean and educated in England, I DO understand that Naipaul knows of what he rights about.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2015Bit tedious and predictable. No likeable characters and generally depressive feel to the book. Though from time to time the genius of Naipul is evident especially writing about the last days of colonial Africa. Surely no one writes as well as Naipul on Africa. He pulls no punches. Incredible he has won any prizes in the politically correct pointless world of modern literature.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2006The title of "Half a Life" had a second meaning that became clear only after "Magic Seeds" was published. The latter isn't a sequel - it's the second half of the former.
There are many wonderful things about the combination novel, beginning with the almost magically concise style Naipaul has mastered, or more properly has invented. There are ironies within ironies, as in the comic parallels between the personal and sexual disappointments that drive Indian guerillas into the woods and drive the character of Roger into a Tom Wolfe style of conservative cultural politics. Both attempts to channel sexual frustration into politics are equally ineffectual to change the world, or even to avert personal calamity. Neither is ultimately much more than an expression of bitterness toward a world that refuses to conform to the individual's idealized vision of it - for the magic seeds that refused to sprout.
Throughout there are references to the way in which people pick up ideas of what they should be or say, and then try to act up to those ideas, or ideals - references that evidently go right over the heads of critics who insist on seeing the things the characters do and say as reflections of Naipaul, when they're not even true reflections of the characters themselves.
There is great pleasure in reading these extraordinarily well-written books, and a still-deeper pleasure in thinking them through after you finish. They're masterpieces that people will be reading with admiration and even awe a hundred years from now.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2005Magic Seeds is the sequel to V.S. Naipaul's powerful novel, Half a Life. If you have not yet read that book, I strongly urge you to do so before you read this one. Otherwise, you will feel like Scotty beamed you up into a seat of an airplane on its way somewhere without any warning.
In Half a Life, Willie Chandran left his native India to pursue his education in England and found himself to be miserable there. With a little notoriety from his writing, he attracts the attention of a wealthy wife and moves to Africa where he lives an indolent life. In that book, Willie is established as someone too passive to seize on his own desires . . . and leads a shadow-like existence that doesn't please him.
In Magic Seeds, Willie has left Africa and finds himself as a temporary visitor in Berlin with his radicalized sister who wants him to return to India as a guerrilla fighter. While there, he realizes that revolutionary warfare is often more about the power lust of the revolutionaries than any potential benefit to those who they are supposed to be liberating. The resulting story is a scathing indictment of leftist revolutionary movements. After many years in the field, Willie turns himself in and is imprisoned. There, he finds that escaping the revolutionaries is almost as hard as ever . . . and his life still suffers from being too passive in the face of the resolve of others.
Unexpectedly released from prison, Willie returns to England and encounters the modern "civilized" world and finds it wanting as well. But Willie has started to grow up at last and begins to seize on initiative to get what he wants . . . and to learn from those who have been too greedy at following their impulses and ideologies. He even begins to see that there are times when being passive can be rewarding, and he begins to use passivity as a strategy to gain his ends. You also find out what happened to many of the characters who influence Willie in Half a Life.
The book's main weakness is that Mr. Naipaul is obsessed with the idea that people shouldn't be so easily swayed by others into making life-changing decisions based on limited information and spurious logic. They are looking for magic seeds that will lead them up Jack's beanstalk to slay a giant and gather up a hen that lays golden eggs. That's a silly search. There are no magic seeds. That theme is repeated and developed from every possible angle. The message overweighs the story so that this becomes more like a philosophical novel rather than a story-telling novel.
Top reviews from other countries
- Amazon CustomerReviewed in Canada on August 4, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent condition, quite prompt delivery
best condition of all the books ordered; most prompt delivery, too
- LomaharshanaReviewed in India on May 1, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Important novel to read for modern Indians
I got the hardcover edition for ₹1,395. It was sold by India Book Club. The book arrived in very good condition (which is a rarity on Amazon India). It is the 2004 edition published in the UK by Picador.
Now about what's inside the book. “Magic Seeds” is Naipaul's last novel. It tells the second half of the story of an Indian man called Willie Chandran. (The first part was narrated by Naipaul in “Half a Life” in 2001.) Like an expert surgeon, Naipaul dissects Chandran’s mind as his life hurtles from Africa to India to England and lays it on a table for us to see. You will be astonished to see how accurately Naipaul understands what people think. If you are Indian, you will be even more amazed to see how accurately he understands how Indians think.
Left-liberal Indians hate Naipaul for his accurate attack on the Nehruvian Left and his life-long support for a “confident” Hindutva. But in my opinion Naipaul has produced the only compelling criticism of modern India. As a changing society, India needs criticism to keep it on the straight and narrow. But criticising India is hard. But most right-wing Indians’ patriotism comes in the way of them assessing India accurately. And most left-wing Indians are too blind in their hatred of India and their bigotry to produce a constructive criticism. Naipaul is neither. That is why his criticism becomes realistic and important.
For example, Bengali youth will find Naipaul's criticism of Naxalite communists sobering. In his confusion, Chandran goes to fight with the Naxalites in the forests. After a hard-wrenching event there, he concludes, ”I am among absolute maniacs.” Chandran’s subsequent emigration to the UK is occasion for Naipaul to show what modern Indians really want and what they have denied themselves in their homeland thanks to leftist populism. Typically for Naipaul, the list includes Chandran’s distaste for “cardboard boxes tied by string” that Indian passengers carry on the flight, and his admiration for the kitchen hobs and wallpaper in his UK home.
The book ends in Chandran discovering wisdom. Very appropriate ending for the last novel by Naipaul, who once said that he being Indian is his religion.
- MGReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 12, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
A great read.
-
recluseReviewed in Japan on December 17, 2005
4.0 out of 5 stars どこに主人公は向かうのか?
この作品は、half a lifeの続編です。前作は、主人公が崩壊直前のアフリカの旧植民地からベルリンに脱出した時点で終わっていましたが、この続編では、主人公が次なる運命を求めて彷徨しながら、自分のこれまでの軌跡を振り返る姿が赤裸々に描写されます。英語自体はわかりやすいのですが、ある程度のインド並びに英国(council estateの持つ象徴的な意味合いがわかる日本人なんているわけないだろ)についての基本的な常識を必要とする点では難解な作品なのかもしれません。相変わらず取り上げられている題材は、すべて日本人には、理解しがたい歴史の業です。本作では、主人公が参加するインドでのゲリラ運動とその中での無意味な党派的な対立、そして主人公がその後にたどり着く、労働党政権の諸政策の跡が皮肉的な形で(unintended consequences)色濃く残る1980年代後半の英国です。主人公自身も50歳の声を聞くようになりますが、さまざまな価値観が交錯し混乱する1980年代後半の英国の中で、依然として自分の進むべき方向を喪失したままです。しかし、主人公が指摘する、人種の差異の解消を世代を超えて目指したある黒人の一生の軌跡は、naipaulが現在の時点でたどり着いたひとつの結論なのかもしれません。となれば、その意味は深いながらも悲劇的なものです。そして、この作品はnaipaulの初期の作品の再読を促がすものかもしれません。
- Gurpal SinghReviewed in India on March 28, 2023
2.0 out of 5 stars Wate of time
The books goes to great lengths, quite literally to nowhere.