This is not one of Naipaul's better books. It was very good for about three quarters of the book but fell apart in the last quarter. I was almost half way through before I realized that this is a follow up to "Half a Life". It is a continuation of Willie Chandran's life after his marriage and move to Africa. When his marriage ends he moves in with his sister until she tires of him and he then moves back to India and becomes involved with an underground movement and lives in a jungle. After several years and many misadventures he ends up in prison. Up to this point the book was very entertaining but it slowly began losing its appeal after that. As in "Half a Life" Willie seems to just blunder his way through life and eventually things seem to work out okay for him. Naipaul created a very entertaining character in Willie and took him through an extraordinary variety of adventures and places. I just wish the book would have ended on a better note.

Jammer, maar dit boek doet geen recht aan Naipauls reputatie. Het is het vervolg op "Half a Life", wat ik erg goed vond. In dit boek gaat het verhaal van de hoofdpersoon, Willy, uit Half a Life door. Dat deel is zeker zo goed als het eerste boek, maar op driekwart van het boek, als het verhaal van Willy bijna is afgelopen, voegt Naipaul ineens een stuk toe, dat m.i. onnodig is en de kwaliteit van het boek niet ten goede komt. Dit gaat over de escapades van de engelse middle/upperclass met vrouwen uit de "lagere milieus". Misschien bedoeld als tegenwicht tegen het kastensysteem en de kritiek daarop in India. Ik weeet het niet, maar ik vond het een irritant slecht laatste stuk.

seriously conflicted about this book - felt it rated 5-stars until the last 42 pages - then it became yet another hate on the poors exercise - given the never ending GOPee hate fest we in the USA are currently living perhaps I have become a tad too angry. Is this tired tale of the council-estates VS's view or just the prejudices of one of his characters? JK's 'Casual Vacancy' did a more credible job of analysing this difficult subject. it's easy to attack those who are ill equipped for life.

A shame because the first book, 'Half a Life', and the first 238 pages of 'Magic Seeds' contain some damn fine writing.

Page 162, "She (Willie's sister Sarojini) wore a white sari - white the color of grief -"
The people of far-off places have different world views.

I enjoy very much Willie's journey in India and his struggle in the movement- which later known that he joined the wrong movement. I love Naipaul description about India (I love everything about India) and the way the movement goes is depressing yet interesting. However, when the setting changed into London, I found it bit boring.

Compared to Bend in the River or House for Mr. Biswas, this is not Naipaul's most perfect work by any means. The book's structure wobbles. But even an imperfect offering from Naipaul is worth twice most other books on the market.

The writing may be great but.... what was the point of it all?

"No entanto, agora que falo contigo e me ponho no lugar dele, tenho a sensação que as nossas ideias no sentido de fazer o bem aos outros estão desatualizadas, que não passam de absurda vaidade num mundo que mudou. E cheguei a pensar, ao meditar no assunto, que o melhor da nossa civilização - a compaixão e as leis - pode ter sido utilizado para destruir essa mesma civilização."

"(...) homem cruel que destila maldade pelos quatro cantos da casa. Não há ninguém mais vaidoso e perverso do que um indivíduo que vem de baixo e só pensa em nivelar as coisas."

Firstly I feel that it is only fair to admit that I read this book not realising that it is the sequal to another,'Half a Life', which I've not read so that will almost certainly have a bearing on my opinion of this book.

The story, such as it is, revolves around Willie Chadran, an Indian who grew up in India, went to university in London before moving to Africa and marrying a Portuguese woman. After 18 years of marriage he leaves his wife and move to Berlin and his sister, whom he has had little contact with for 20 years. In Berlin he finds his sister has been radicalised into being a supporter of some Indian revolutionaries. She cajoles Willie into returing to India, a country he has not visited since his childhood and does not understand to join the rebelion. Willie soon becomes disallusioned with the rebels but is too fearful and complacent to leave them. Eventually he is captured, imprisoned and eventually released and returned to London. The magic seeds of the title refer to the crazy notion of climbing a giant beanstalk and there slaying a giant.

That all said I'm afraid that I wasn't overly impressed this book. On the whole I rather liked Naipaul's writing style and that the story, such as it is, is many layered however after a while the frequent repetitions became somewhat grating. However, my main problems was with the chracters.In particular the fact that I just could not relate or empathise with any of them. Willie himself just seems to drift from one situation to the next like a feather on the wind and then does nothing but moan about where he has landed rather than actually trying to make a life for himself. Mainly I felt that they all became merely vehicles for Naipaul's own prejudices. The predominant ones being power and class.

Now I rather enjoyed his critique of revolutionaries and how they are more interested in personal power than they are in the needs and interests of the people that they are supposedly fighting for, not just in India but all over the world. However, once Willi returned to London and the 'civilized' world the story then centres predominantly on his friend and benefactor Roger and Roger's wife Perdita and their marriage problems. This, although comical at times, became too banal for my taste. In the end I felt that all the characters were merely whingers and as such annoying.

I did reach the end of the book so it can't be all bad but if you do want to read this book make sure that you read the prequal first.

Such a well written book. Takes some time to get through it but totally worth it. My favourite line is "So many calamities, big and small, are: the failure or inability to work out the day-to-day consequences, over a period, of our actions"

The question I asked to myself while reading this book was whether the rest of it would bring about something brilliant as it was in the prequel thereof. Yet, it was really hard to wrap up the last fifty pages. Perhaps this was so because the reader got a feeling that the path willie was walking through would end up a deadlock. So of this rubbish life I expected, or would have wished After having read the book, to see something meaningful! Well, it would have been great to leave misserable Willie as an empty fellow right after his speech with his wife Ana. However, we are compelled to witness willie to be manipulated by his hypocrate sister! Only message I would ilke to get from this book was the tendency of human to get corrupted regardless of the context he/she is embedded to. Ok! But is it the way to Make a half-life a whole through fucking one’s only best friend’s girl? I do not know! Half a life was a Good piece indeed. Yet! This one…

Perhaps if I had first read Half a Life, where Willie Chandran is introduced, this book would have made more sense. I floundered for most of the book trying to figure out Willie’s back story and what it had to do with this one. Willie was an appealing man, Indian by birth, who had floated around the world aimlessly to London for schooling, to an unnamed war-torn country in Africa, to West Berlin to live with his radical sister Sarojini, to India to join communist guerillas in an attempt to start a peasant revolution, to prison in India for 10 years, and back to London where he awkwardly joined the upwardly mobile middle class. By the end of the novel Willie seemed even more stifled and aimless than he had at the beginning.

I found this to be a disappointing, even disturbing, novel by Nobel laureate Naipaul. Naipaul’s lyrical mastery of the English language is not sufficient to draw the reader into this anemic story or to make the book worth reading.

Half A Life (2001) might have been better been left without this sequel, which ruffles reviewers' feathers as only a grand old man of literature can. Though his trophy shelf holds a Nobel Prize, his past accomplishments buy him little sympathy. In fact, it's often difficult to tell if critics are more put off by Magic Seeds or their appraisal of Willie Chandran as a mouthpiece for Naipaul's politics. For an author whose greatest works have a heavy dose of autobiography, this reaction is not surprising, though it makes one wonder whether critics are reading the novel or dissecting the author. In the end, one hopes the unlikable characters, implausible plotting, and general fog of pessimism are what doom this book, not critical disappointment in Naipaul.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.