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Magic Seeds
A Novel
by V.S. Naipaul
Continuing the story of 2001's "Half a Life," Nobel winner V.S. Naipaul continues the account of life and political awakening of Willie Chandran, a self-exiled native of India, in a novel about identity and idealism, and their ability to shape or destroy us.
Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pages
11/16/2004
$25.00
ISBN: 0375407367
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Daily Telegraph Philip Hensher
Whether Magic Seeds is an incomplete part of a series, or whether its effect of incompleteness is part of an aesthetic effect, it demands our attention, and nothing more authoritative will be published this year.
Publishers Weekly
In a world in which terrorism continually haunts the headlines, Naipaul's work is indispensable.
Booklist
We expect brilliant thought and sensitive artistry from Naipaul, and once again, we are not disappointed.
Boston Globe Sven Birkerts
Progress, for Naipaul, has become part of the problem; it belongs with that ideal view of things we need to outgrow once and for all.
Wall Street Journal Tunku Varadarajan
An elegant little story -- with a moral.
Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Riemer
The result is mostly exhilarating, though a source of frustration perhaps for those who don't know "Half a Life." My advice would be: read that novel first.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Charles Foran
Why, then, is this cranky tract so exhilarating? Granted, many readers will not find it to be that way. But the book is far from bereft of conventional satisfactions. As always with Naipaul, the prose is muscular and precise.
San Francisco Chronicle Carey Harrison
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. In it, life is slow, tedious, sometimes startlingly illuminating.
Daily Telegraph Anthony Thwaite
There's another minor character in Half a Life, who is a soothsayer. 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.
Entertainment Weekly Troy Patterson
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.
Kirkus Reviews
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.
Washington Post Michael Dirda
But it is also true of novels -- when program predominates over story, the result is tedium. Naipaul doesn't escape this trap in Magic Seeds, even though he pens some brilliant sentences.
The New York Times Book Review James Atlas
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.
The Spectator Alberto Manguel
The reader feels as if here, in these last moments, Naipaul has all of a sudden dismissed his fictions and stepped himself on to the stage. This is not Willie speaking, the reader says; these are the words of an angry old man who no longer believes in 'the immense human idea' he once thought beautiful.
The Independent Michael Glover
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.
PopMatters Lester Pimentel
History has certainly been unkind to social engineering and heaven-on-earth political panaceas. Magic Seeds' attempt to chronicle this past is ultimately disappointing, however. The account is too neat, too partisan. Sadly, Naipaul's once-illuminating prism has become clouded by the fog of ideology.
Los Angeles Times Richard Eder
Like other forms of negative capability, moroseness needs a great deal of artistic energy to hold its materials together. In Magic Seeds, a sort of sequel to the more vital "Half a Life," it has dwindled to irritability, with the energy diminished. The themes and ideas are desultory, a pack of cards shuffled to the point of losing their snap and dealt out erratically in the course of what amounts to two different stories.
The Independent Paul Bailey
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.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
And 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.
Village Voice Uday Benegal
Magic Seeds is a life away from his real worth as a writer. 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.
London Review Of Books Theo Tait
Magic Seeds, even more than its predecessor, is a horrible novel - icy, misanthropic, pitiless, purposefully pinched in both its style and its sympathies.
The Guardian Mike Phillips
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.
 The average user rating for this book is 6.5 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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