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the complete review - fiction

Magic Seeds

by
V.S.Naipaul

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A : impressive meditation on contemporary anomie

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus, with some impressed but more finding it disturbing and disappointing

  From the Reviews:

• "Naipaul is deliberately obscure throughout about Willie's external coordinates -- the politics, the specifics of locale, even the increments of passing time. As a result, the reader cannot help but focus on the inner picture, the progressive wearing away of all that would orient a man toward meaning." - Sven Birkerts, Boston Globe
  
  
• "At the end of one passage, Willie says: "And, as so often with her when she was soothsaying or story-telling, we couldn't tell at the end how we had got to where we had got. Everybody just had to look solemn and stay quiet for a while". That's rather how I feel about Magic Seeds." - Anthony Thwaite, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "Too static to be much of a thriller and often too schematic to draw us fully to its hero's heart, Magic Seeds nonetheless offers a gripping glimpse at the sadness of a dream deformed." - Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "Magic Seeds seems to represent some sort of struggle to reassess and defend his life's work. In the end the enterprise is a failure, largely because the author has nothing new or interesting to offer. There may be many reasons to admire the body of Naipaul's writing. This book is not one of them." - Mike Phillips, The Guardian
  
  
• "The truth is that there is something sad about the fact that someone who is, beyond doubt, a major literary figure of our times -- someone whose honesty and courage has been enabling and formative for so many -- should be exiting with such a weak book." - Alok Rai, The Hindu
  
  
• "I wish I could record that Magic Seeds is written with Naipaul's customary elegance, but I can't, because it isn't. The prose is repetitive, set down in a faux-naïf manner that soon irritates. If Willie is the principal character in a third novel, I shall not be following his further progress. Enough is truly enough." - Paul Bailey, The Independent
  
  
• "The story is told with a ruthless economy of means, sparely, and with an almost brutal simplicity. In fact, it is told almost clumsily at times. Nothing is embellished; there are no descriptive flourishes of any kind whatsoever, nothing to feed the appetite of lovers of Victorian fiction. (...) It is difficult to love this novel because, finally, it feels parsimonious, haughty and out of love with this fallen world of teeming humanity. A kind of grudging admiration is perhaps the best that Naipaul can hope for from its readers" - Michael Glover, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "Magic Seeds, even more than its predecessor, is a horrible novel -- icy, misanthropic, pitiless, purposefully pinched in both its style and its sympathies. (...) But Magic Seeds is not just a book-length piece of bufferish provocation. Though difficult and often physically disturbing to read, it has resonant images, an insidious intelligence, and the distant cousin of a sense of humour." - Theo Tait, London Review of Books
  
  
• "Die argumentative Brillanz und Naipauls inneres Feuer, seine Verzweiflung und seine Empathie haben Gefühlskälte und Bitterkeit Platz gemacht. Welchen Gewinn ein Leser aus diesem sterilen Roman ziehen soll, der wie eine bösartige Parodie wirkt, ist nicht klar." - Georg Sütterlin, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "These are the qualities that have made Naipaul one of the finest social novelists of our time; yet none of these is enough to rescue Magic Seeds. (...) In this book, where the idea being confronted is the rationale behind mass political movements, his characteristic feeling for form, language and character is swamped by a tide of distaste for Maoists, Indian peasants, British workers, white liberals and women. (...) The self-incriminating lines his characters are given choke them before they have had a chance to breathe" - Siddhartha Deb, New Statesman
  
  
• "It is not among Naipaul’s better novels. He was once praised for the spareness of his prose style, which some people called, in shorthand, simplicity; that spareness has now become simple, and, in imitation perhaps of Tolstoy, or Gandhi, Naipaul has begun to write like a fabulist. The scenes are set pieces that invariably end with Willie spelling out the moral." - Keith Gessen, New York
  
  
• "There are times in Naipaul's work where we feel him driven by rage, and other moments when we can feel the glee of a happy Cassandra: an enjoyment at being the man to give us the bad news, to tell us what we don't want to hear. Magic Seeds is full of those moments" - John Lanchester, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "Magic Seeds, in contrast, is less a full-fledged novel than a didactic thesis featuring characters who deliver speeches instead of conversation, and who seem less like real people than mouthpieces for the author's own sour opinions about everything from colonialism to multiculturalism to the English welfare state. (...) Mr. Naipaul's contempt for all the people he has created in this novel makes for a mean, stingy book - a book full of judgmental pronouncements and free-floating rage, and sadly bereft of insight, compassion or wisdom." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
  
  
• "Magic Seeds is a lazy book. Gone is even the pretext of narrative art or plausible dialogue. The characters hold forth as if they're in a Diderot play. (...) The sex scenes are ghastly." - James Atlas, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "(A)lthough Naipaul's prose is as intelligent, probing and masterful as ever, and Magic Seeds is a complex, rigorous book, the story ultimately lacks real magic." - Carl Wilkinson, The Observer
  
  
• "The life Willie Chandran leads, and the reality he observes, is imagined for us in painfully bleak detail. Never has Naipaul's language been more carefully confined. Terse, accurate, concrete, it offers a brutally claustrophobic image of existence. And yet it is precisely this, in a world forever grabbing at salvation, that makes Magic Seeds so liberating to read." - Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "In spite of its austere and ungenerous vision, Magic Seeds is pleasingly well-paced and, for the most part, elegantly written." - Scotland on Sunday
  
  
• "Reading Magic Seeds we are not, to use a Naipaul title, ‘among the believers’. We are among the pretenders." - Alberto Manguel, The Spectator
  
  
• "What is left is a style of narrow, exquisite refinement. The story is told straight, in dry sequence. Most of the book runs like a philosophical dialogue between characters. Many of the small episodes are punctuated by Willie's thoughts, baldly presented. (...) With its deliberate narrowness of means, its characteristic noble grace of expression, and the disillusioned clarity of its analysis, this is a radical further step in one of the great imaginative careers of our time." - Philip Hensher, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "Magic Seeds is an important enrichment of Naipaul's oeuvre. But making sense of it is an uneasy business. It has been increasingly clear with his late fictions that we read them to hear the author's voice, not those of his characters (how different it is to read A House for Mr Biswas). The experience is undoubtedly powerful, but it yields a diminished sense of what the novel is for." - Sunil Khilnani, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "The book is mostly prosaic, needlessly repetitive; if nothing else, perfectly symbiotic with Willie Chandran's own flaccid character. Like Willie it stutters and drifts, lacking cogency and depth of spirit. Naipaul himself seems drained of all desire to engage the reader, or too jaded to try." - Uday Benegal, The Village Voice
  
  
• "Magic Seeds, from Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, isn't much of a novel; the prose is alternately odd and masterful, and the book will puzzle many readers. In particular, the overall aimlessness of the plot provokes restiveness and is likely to cause one to wonder: Am I missing something ?" - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Um es gleich zu sagen: Dies ist ein immens wichtiges Buch. Dies ist ein geradezu grandios gescheiterter Roman." - Marko Martin, Die Welt
  
  
• "Naipauls neuer Roman mit dem geheimnisvollen Titel Magische Saat überrascht indessen durch eine zutiefst düstere und pessimistische Weltsicht und frauenfeindliche Invektiven. (...) So unplastisch Willies Erleben im indischen Dschungelkrieg bleibt, in den Details besticht Naipauls Genauigkeit stets aufs Neue." - Martin R. Dean, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       V.S.Naipaul told the story of Willie Somerset Chandran's first forty years in Half A Life. Magic Seeds continues Willie's story, yet this is not a life made whole: it continues, very much, to remain half a life.
       Magic Seeds picks up where Half A Life left off, Willie living with his sister in Berlin. The opening suggests a retrospective approach:

     It had begun many years before, in Berlin. Another world. He was living there in a temporary, half-and-half way with his sister Sarojini.

There has been some mistake. I have fallen in among the wrong people. I have come to the wrong revolution.

There was to be a renewed emphasis on the old idea of liquidating the class enemy. Since the feudal people had long ago run away, and there was strictly speaking no class enemy left in these villages, the people to be liquidated were the better off.

Murders of class enemies -- which now meant only peasants with a little too much land -- were required now, to balance the successes of the police.

It no longer excited him to see the London of his past. To see it too often was to strip it of memories, and in this way to lose precious pieces of himself.

The common people are as confused and uncertain as everybody else. They are actors, like everybody else. Their accents are changing. They try to be like people in the television soaps, and now they've lost touch with what they really might be. And there's no one to tell them.

     I had worked out a character for her, but, as had been happening more and more in my work in recent years, I had got it wrong.

They're confused. They're not too well educated. That was the smart thing at one time. But now they don't know who they are and what's expected of them. The world has changed much too quickly for them.

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Links:

• Alfred A. Knopf publicity page
• Interview at The Observer
• Interview at BBC

• Baltimore City Paper
• Berliner Zeitung (German)
• Boston Globe
• Daily Telegraph
• Deccan Herald
• The Globe and Mail
• The Guardian
• Harvard Book Review
• The Hindu
• Independent on Sunday
• London Review of Books
• New Statesman
• New York
• The New York Times Book Review
• Newsday
• The Northern Rivers Echo
• The Observer
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
• PopMatters
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Straight
• Sunday Telegraph
• Le Temps (French)
• Time (Asia)
• The Tribune
• The Village Voice
• The Washington Post
• Die Welt (German)
• Die Zeit (German)

• V.S.Naipaul: An Overview
• V.S.Naipaul at books and writers
• V.S.Naipaul at Contemporary Writers
• Nobel Lecture by Naipaul
• Nobel Prize press release
• Interview in Die Welt (German)
• Contributions to The New York Review of Books (almost all essentially inaccessible)

• Between Father and Son
• Half A Life
• Literary Occasions
• Reading & Writing
• The Writer and the World

• Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review
• See Index of Books by Nobel laureates under review

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About the Author:

       Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He attended University College, Oxford. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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© 2004-2009 the complete review

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