Since I didn't read the first book in this series, I came to Willie in Germany on his way to India to take part in a revolution his sister discovered for him, something to keep cure his boredom. Unfortunately, once he arrives in India, he finds the revolutionaries are psychopaths; it takes him seven years to extract himself from this group, landing in jail where he writes short stories. It's these stories that, once published, embarrass those holding him into releasing him to his publisher, and off he goes to London.

The whole story is a fog in my mind, really. I'm not exactly sure Willie makes any contribution to those he seeks to save, but just seems to be gloomy and cynical.

As I began reading this book, I realized that this was a book that I had given up trying to read a few years ago. The main character Willie is portrayed to be a person who is drifting in life and searching for a cause to make his life more meaningful. He is pushed by his sister Sarojini to do something, make up his mind. He goes to India to join a guerilla movement, wanders around in forests with the wrong group. No one knows what the cause is, what the goals are, and in this process in between murders, lands into jail. Willie makes mental notes of his impressions of people in India and places he visits, the roads, the foods, his feelings...he spends all his time outside of himself, as an outsider. His introspection is infuriating and it was nothing but will power that made me force myself to complete this book. From the jail, Willie manages to extricate himself back to London where, typical of his drifting nature, he accepts the hospitality of his old-time friend Roger and starts living his house. In the middle of the book, he confesses that he has never acquired any skills to work because his father as a temple owner also did not have one. He realizes that not having to work, the only thing his sister and he were good at was finding faults, criticizing what others did. He enters in an extra-marital affair with Roger's wife for no reason but because he is bored and this was something that he had fantasized about 20 years ago. There are no moral pangs for any character in this book. Roger has been having an affair with Marion, Rger's wife is sleeping with the banker, the banker's wife is sleeping with someone else. The book ends with a marriage that Roger and Willie attend in which Marcus, a black man has invited them. Marcus's son is marrying a white girl and Marcus's wish was to have white grand children. The bride and groom are marrying after they have already had some kids. The book brings across decaying values in the moral area and nothing seems to surprise Willie. I probably do not wish to recommend this book unless you are a very patient kind of person. Will you get something out of this book? Yes, every book has something to offer - there are statements that can have profound meaning, reflections, Willie's musings as he drifts in his life.

I enjoyed Naipaul's insightful and often clever observations about the global struggles of the economically downtrodden--the "churning of the castes." But his prose is often dense and sometimes repetitive. For me, the narrative bogged down amid the protagonist's phase as a forest-dwelling revolutionary in India. It recovered in the final third of book, with his keen look at the lives of the poor of North London's housing projects juxtaposed against the absurd lives of wealthy show-offs.

This is the most depressing book I've read since Revolutionary Road, which led me down a 5 year spiral to the bottom... I might not finish it.

Well I did finish it, and it just got worse. I think not reading the prequel (Half Life) left me a bit lacking in insight regarding the main character, but that said, Willie is a cardboard presentation - just a vehicle for Naipaul to push out his angry, cranky politics and disregard for the working class and human struggle. So I probably won't go out looking for more Naipaul, but it is well-written, decently structured book. It had to be for me to get through it. Anyway, it is what it is - two stars.

Coming across this book was kind of an accident. At Calabash, Derek Walcott debuted a poem in which he called Naipaul a mongoose and criticized him for abandoning a Caribbean identity and solidarity with Afro-Caribbean populations. Naipaul was born in Trinidad of Indian heritage. (The mongoose is an animal brought to the Caribbean from India by the British). Anyhow, this made me want to read Naipaul who like Walcott is a Nobel Prize winner. Everyone says "don't read the last book," but I was at Bookophilia and this one only cost $345 J and I'm broke like a joke so "Magic Seeds" it was!

I actually enjoyed it. The main character is on a quest for identity and ideals, and he joins a revolution in India. The book, for me, was sort of a cross between Voltaire's "Candide" and Nabokov's "Lolita" in that the main character is sort of perverse yet comic anti-hero and the story is in many ways as absurd as it is realistic. Although the narrative is dry and stiff at the beginning, it gets better. "Magic Seeds" is actually the sequal to "Half a Life," which I haven't read, so I wonder how my reading might have changed if I read the first one.

Here is an excerpt from Walcott's poem (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/...

Walcott's Words

An extract from 'The Mongoose'

I have been bitten, I must avoid infection

Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction

Read his last novels, you'll see just

what I mean

A lethargy, approaching the obscene

The model is more ho-hum than Dickens

The essays have more bite

They scatter chickens like critics, but

each stabbing phrase is poison

Since he has made that snaring style

a prison

The plots are forced, the prose

sedate and silly

The anti-hero is a prick named Willie

Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence

And whines with his creator's

self-abhorrence

Brilliant, so meticulously written.

Seems to me a pretty pointless novel. Protagonist Willie Chandra is a puppet; he gets directed initially by his sister to joint revolutionary forces in India in order to connect with his past and to turn his back on the decadence of modern Western Europe. But all he learns is how underground movements exploit the poor.
And so his search continues for something ‘real’. The novel is expansive; Willie lives in Germany, the U.K, Africa, India; in flats, houses, hotels and even a prison. But he is listless, dissatisfied and uncommitted.
I found myself listless and unengaged too. Willie says ‘I have come to the wrong revolution’. I felt I had come to the wrong book.

This is a book about the shifting shadows of identity and the fluidity of human personality when faced with new and challenging situations. Willie Chandran's life is a series of accidents. He has wondered through experience like a tourist, never really committing to anything or anyone. But this is not the musings of a free spirit in the existenual sense where the most important consideration for the individual is the fact that he or she is an individual—an independently acting and responsible conscious being. The world in this story is a precarious civilization in which our social and ethnic fate is all but sealed; try as we might we can never escape who we are, and must learn to live with our unchosen identities whether we like them or not. Our social essence or identity, according to Naipaul's polemic, very much precedes and limits our existence.

Approaching middle age Willie ends his 18 year marrage and goes to stay in Berlin with his radicalized sister - a leftwing filmmaker who he has had little contact with for over 20 years.
She talks him into going back to India to join a revolutionary movement which she and her partner support. lnspired by her diatribes and longing to do something worthwhile with his life, Willie makes his way back to India - a country he has not returned to since his childhood and soon realises that he no longer understands.
He is quickly disillusioned with the guerrillas - their personal shortcomings and the ill-advised tactics of the movement - but remains involved with them partly out of inertia and partly out of fear that his former comrades will kill him if he tries to leave. In the jungle the stain of shame eats away at the guerillas like a virus, driving these broken and disillusioned 'freedom fighters' on even when the people and the incedents that caused it have long been forgotten. The resulting story is a scathing indictment not only of leftist revolutionary movements but ultimately of human nature in general as even the best intentioned people prove to be weak, incapable, pointless, selfish, callous and mundane. On top of that Willie is exposed to a society swamped by the dominance of tradition. Where one is born and dies within a stupefying caste system with little chance to escape it. Meditating on a sweeper not really doing anything but moving the flith around he muses "Twenty years ago I wouldn't have seen what I am seeing now... I have come from a world of waste and appearances. I saw quite clearly some time ago that it was a simple world, where people had been simplified. I must not go back on that vision. I must understand that now I am among people of more complicated beliefs and social ideas, and at the same time in a world stripped of all style and artifice." The sweeper is a sweeper, it does not matter wether he achieves an end to his actions only that he holds his postion and his place in society. Thus, through Willie's india experience, VS Naipaul offers a brutally claustrophobic image of existence in a fallen world of teeming and ultimately pointless humanity.

Eventually Willie gets captured and imprisoned, and finds life in prison equally unbearable but preferable to the life on a run. Unexpectedly released from prison, Willie returns to England and encounters the modern "civilized" world and finds it wanting as well.
This is also a book about time

Hmm. What to make of this one? I guess it is sort of a continuation of another novel which I haven't read. Maybe that would have helped to ground it some. It's an odd book, in that there isn't much plot. I guess that's the point? Willie is just floating along, going in whatever direction someone points him in. In the process, he comes to terms with immigration, modernization and class differences in England, his home--of sorts. It's an interesting novel--well, no. The novel is a little slow. But there are bits of insights that Willie and his friend Roger share that are very thought provoking. The title, Magic Seeds, gives the whole novel structure, but I didn't figure that out until the last quarter. So, I think this book is probably much better than I give it credit for, but I'm not inclined at the moment to reread it and get to the goods. This would probably be a good book club book because you could get a lot of discussion out of it. But as something to read alone, it's a hair overwhelming.

What I learned from this book would take another book to explain. Naipaul is such a prolix writer with chameleon shifts of tone - and did I mention his incredibly drawn characters? Right now, the brain is swimming in his wonderful sea of words, so let me pick one example of each facet of fiction.

Character: Not fair, not fair. Willie would seem the natural candidate: the transplanted Indian whose father funs an ashram and who begins as a young man in London, writes a book, meets and marries a Portuguese woman and lives 18 vapid years in Africa. Next he joins his sister who hectors and badgers him to get a real life. She lives in Berlin and makes movies with a man named Wolf. His middle name is not Amadeus. Sturck by her passion for an Indian guerilla, he leaves for the subconintent and joins an insurgency group. What matter if he mistakenly joins the enemy of his Ideal. Willie philosophizes a great deal and his one-liners are elegant. But how can I ignore Roger and Perdita and Einstein, Willie's comrade in arms in the teak forests and dismal slums? But who wants to read Son of Magic seeds. Onward and upward.

Setting: Again.....don't fence me in! Which 3-D locale was more memorable than the others? London....has to be; the barbed wire writing about Counsel Housing brings on tears of laughter. But then flashbacks to Berlin's noir cafe scene, or the prospect of a clueless Willie in the midst of a brutal Civil War in Angola are close competitors. One thing for sure, the Indian experience....seven years of eating rice gruel and then the prison scenes must have been the most powerful. I could not wait until he escaped that hell for London's posher inferno.

Tone: You want ring tones, read this novel! Funny, bitingly arch, profoundly wise, frightening, repellent. When Roger begins his extra marital affair with Marion, the swimmer, we are treated to a raucous comedy only Chaucer could have conceived.

Theme: It's a few hours since I got to page 280 and I'll be damned if I can figure out what "Magic Seeds" means. There's a tie in to the beanstalk which the naive Jack climbs only to meet the horrid but stupid giant whom he must outwit in order to get the goose that lays the golden eggs. Roger - the rich attorney who was responsible for Willie's release from Political Prison -- tends to repeat himself while sharing with Willie the story of his life. He, for instance does not want to die full of hatred like his father, but peacefully, smoking his pipe like Van Gogh.Oh, Really? But he does come up with a big clue to the theme: He says he wants to take an ax to the beanstalk roots - cutting off any possibility of fairy tale living. Well, writing this last paragraph was therapeutic since it helped me find the overweening message of Naipaul's book. At the end, Willie has a eureka moment: "It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts." Oh there are twelve more themes wriggling around and up and down the chapters in Magic Seeds. As the book jacket proclaims them: exile, identity, the precariousness of civilization not to mention social justice. These are the seeds Naipaul scatters in the reader's brain and what a delightful and serious headache they create.

Willy leaves his father's ashram in India to study in London where he marries, then spends 18 years on his wife's estate in Portugese East Africa.
He flees revolution in Africa for his sister's in Berlin. At her urging he returns to India to join the worker's revolution. Arrested in India he spends years in jail until he is rescued & to London.

Magic Seeds was my first disappointing Naipaul. African experiences of Willy of Indian origin. Now a revolutionary, now not, the book doesn't quite get anywhere. It is repetitive to the point that it is insulting to the reader's intelligence.