Magic Seeds

James Atlas

Naipaul has written a calculated polemic … Naipaul is suggesting that our racial and ethnic fate is sealed; we can never escape who we are, and must learn to live with our unchosen identities whether we like them or not. It's not a consoling vision; neither is it despairing. It simply is.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

At the end of Half a Life, Naipaul's previous novel, Willie, a young Indian in late 1950s London, travels to Africa. At the beginning of his new novel, Willie is in Berlin with his bossy sister, Sarojini. It is 18 years later. Revolution has uprooted Willie's African existence. Sarojini hooks him up with a guerrilla group in India, and Willie, always ready to be molded to some cause, returns to India. The guerrillas, Willie soon learns, are "absolute maniacs." But caught up, as ever, in the energy of others, Willie stays with them for seven years. He then surrenders and is tossed into the relative comfort of jail. When an old London friend (a lawyer named Roger) gets Willie's book of short stories republished, Willie's imprisonment becomes an embarrassment to the authorities. He is now seen as a forerunner of "postcolonial writing." He returns to London, where he alternates between making love to Perdita, Roger's wife, and looking for a job. One opens up on the staff of an architecture magazine funded by a rich banker (who is also cuckolding Roger). Willie's continual betweenness-a state that makes him, to the guerrillas, a man "who looks at home everywhere"-is the core theme of this novel, and the story is merely the shadow projected by that theme. Sometimes, especially toward the end of the book, as Willie's story becomes more suburban, there is a penumbral sketchiness to the incidents. At one point, Willie, remarking on the rich London set into which he has been flung, thinks: "These people here don't understand nullity." Naipaul does-he 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. Agent, Gillon Aitken. (Nov. 21) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In his 2001 Nobel prize acceptance lecture, Naipaul observed, "I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others." Indeed, Magic Seeds continues and amplifies the checkered career of one Willie Chandran, the wily protagonist of Half a Life. However, Magic Seeds is less a sequel than a fulfillment of Naipaul's superbly nuanced worldview of a post-postcolonialist fiction that sweeps through the Charlottenburg section of Berlin; unnamed forests, villages, and cities of southern India; and, ultimately, arriving in St. John's Wood, a posh neighborhood of London that is clearly not Willie's London of 30 years ago. Willie grapples with sundry dilemmas: repeated expatriations, vexed family obligations, ideological engagement and exhaustion, writerly angst (rediscovering the pleasures of reading while incarcerated, Willie wonders "how anyone ever had the courage to write a sentence"), sexual entanglement, forsaken loyalty, and memories that simply won't melt away over time. Narrated in a disarmingly detached voice, Magic Seeds delivers a truly compelling story spiced with pathos, politics, faith, humor, and intelligence. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/04.]-Mark Andr Singer, Mechanics' Inst. Lib., San Francisco Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The 2001 Nobel winner continues the story of Willie Chandran (Half a Life, 2001), an Indian-born writer (and presumable authorial surrogate). We first glimpse Willie, a perpetual itinerant and outsider, after he's left his Portuguese wife and Africa and moved to Berlin, where he's staying with his sister Sarojini and her German husband. Sarojini's revolutionary ardor rebukes his phlegmatic indifference to causes and allegiances, and so-somewhat improbably-Willie travels to India to join a Communist-led rebellion on behalf of that country's underprivileged and exploited lower castes. He spends several years as a "soldier" and courier-vacillating between hopeful commitment and the cynical suspicion that his comrades are driven by unworthy agendas and doomed to fail-before surrendering to police and accepting imprisonment as the fate he deserves. Then his release is unexpectedly secured by old friend Roger, a British attorney, who argues Willie's special status as an internationally significant writer. Freed, Willie returns to London and the home of Roger and the wife (Perdita) with whom he shares a desiccated, loveless open marriage. The novel's emphases then shift curiously, as Willie's reentry into intellectual life (working for a small architectural magazine) is subordinated to his subdued rediscovery of sex (with equally passive Perdita) and sharpened awareness of the slough of amoral cheapness into which England-and, by extension, Western civilization-seems to him to have lapsed. Naipaul ends with Willie's characteristically resigned expostulation "It's wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts." Magic Seeds (the title alludes ironically to the tale ofJack and the Beanstalk) is a superbly elaborated screed, which eloquently restates the case for perceiving the contemporary world as irretrievably fallen: it's a case Naipaul has been making for decades. This great writer's rhetorical and constructive mastery remain unimpaired. But he's still beating horses so long dead that the stench is becoming overpowering. First printing of 40,000; first serial to the New Yorker. Agent: Gillon Aitken/Gillon Aitken Associates