The NYT reviews Magic Seeds, V.S. Naipaul’s sequel to Half a Life. Naipaul’s protagonist Willie Chandran join a pointless communist group in India, a metaphor for the reign of Marxists in the author’s native Caribbean:
Willie is the latest exemplar of a type familiar to Naipaul’s readers: the fanatical idealist drawn to… “socialist mimicry.” Cheddi B. Jagan, the orthodox Marxist who rose to become prime minister of Guyana; Michael X, the black power leader who ends up a murderer in Trinidad… Naipaul is infuriated by their charade, the fraudulent progressive ideology that masks their will to power.
Chandran is eventually disabused of his fuzzy-minded notions. Naipaul also mocks hopes for a postracial society, and not gently:
Willie attends the wedding of the half-English son of Marcus, a West African diplomat “who lived for interracial sex, and wanted to have a white grandchild.” The groom, Lyndhurst (“very English,” Roger comments dryly), is marrying a white woman, a union that will result in the culmination of Marcus’s dream. The wedding takes place at a grand house fallen into dereliction in the English countryside. A passage from Othello is read, an “Aruba-Curacao” band plays…. just as the mixed-race couple is about to exchange vows, one of the children they’ve had out of wedlock audibly passes gas, no one is certain which: “But the guests lined up [with political correctness] on this matter: the dark people thought the dark child” had done it; “the fair people thought it was the fair child.”
The reviewer finds the Nobel Prize winner in need of an editor:
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… Naipaul dwells in alarming detail on the precise anatomical convolutions… why is anal sex such a literary preoccupation these days?… Henry Miller he’s not.
In unwitting tribute, the reviewer adopts Naipaul’s own astringent tone and fires at his pompousness:
Last month he made the public announcement at a speech in New Delhi that his new novel, Magic Seeds, may be his last. “I am really quite old now,” he said, turning his biblical span into premature senescence… And because V. S. Naipaul will no longer write novels, the genre must die. “I have no faith in the survival of the novel. It is almost over. The world has changed and people do not have the time to give that a book requires.”
Here’s a previous post on Naipaul and Trinidad.
Update: Michiko Kakutani slays and fillets.
[L]ess a full-fledged novel than a didactic thesis featuring characters who deliver speeches instead of conversation… The book should have been written as a series of essays or op-ed pieces, not poorly disguised as a would-be work of fiction…The revolutionaries condescendingly describe the peasants as “cricket people, matchstick people,” whose “minds have gone after the centuries of malnourishment.”… Mr. Naipaul’s contempt for all the people he has created in this novel makes for a mean, stingy book…
thanks manish for the link (NYT review of magic seeds). Interesting.
I read a couple of chapters of that book..my impression pretty good book from Naipaul, sequel to Half a life and very interesting. He starts the book with gandhi and his obsessions (same tone as a chapter on gandhi in his book- India a wounded civilisation) and the protagonist willie trying to follow gandhis path of returning to indian political system bored with life in england and africa.Gandhi became a mahatma while willie just fails badly and had to return back to england. Naipaul wants to make sure his readers understand Gandhi and his obsessions.
And now I feel after reading most of naipaul’s novels,probably his protagonists in all his novels are leading Gandhi’s life ( england, africa and returning back to india), yet looking at all these countries from Naipaul POV and his personal experiences in these countries since he lived there.
The chapters I read he still retains a unique way of looking at india, pretty realistic probably depicting indian middle class communist/rebels in kerala, assam and probably some chapters are like life in srilankan LTTE camps. Disillusioned willie trying again to fit into an exotic culture just the way he does in england and africa. I did not read the whole novel but the ending chapters of return to england and some romance seemed boring. He started out well.
Regarding editing this novel probably his earlier novels also need some editing,specially enigma of arrival needed a lot more of that..that whole book had so many paragraphs written on gardens,houses, long descriptions and lot of repeated descriptions.
And I think this might be his last book. Its hard to write when someone is 70 yrs old..I can never write or be so active that when Iam that old..And I still think he has a unique style of writing, most of his books are like travelogues about lives of people in different countries and the protagonist trying to fit into the culture and his experiences in those countries.
I THINK NAIPAUL ALMOST UNNECESSARILY PROLONGED WILLIE’S PURSUIITS… IT SEEMS HE WAS LOOKING FOR HIS OWN ROOTS AND ROUTES VIA HIM(WILLIE).NAIPAUL HAS MADE THIS BOOK VERY LONG RELATIVE TO THE CONTENT OF IT. DESPITE HIS CRISP LINGUISTIC COMMAND IT COMES ACROSS AS A DRAG.