Magic Seeds

Magic Seeds

by V.S.Naipaul (Author)

Synopsis

Willie Chandran is a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. In his early forties, after a peripatetic life, he succumbs to the encouragement of his sister - and his own listlessness - and joins an underground movement in India. But years of revolutionary campaigns and then prison convince him that the revolution 'had nothing to do with what we were fighting for', and he feels himself further than ever 'from his own history.' When he returns to Britain where, thirty years before, his wanderings began, Willie encounters a country that has turned its back on its past and, like him, has become detached from its own history. He endures the indignities of a culture dissipated by reform and compromise until, in a moment of grotesque revelation - a tour de force of parodic savagery from our most visionary of writers - Willie comes to an understanding that might finally allow him to release his true self. Praise for "Magic Seeds": 'Original, ruthlessly honest, intellectually stimulating and masterfully written'. "The Times". 'A radical further step in one of the great imaginative careers of our time ..." Magic Seeds" demands our attention, and nothing more authoritative will be published this year'. Philip Hensher, "Daily Telegraph". 'Spare, concentrated and always capable of breaking out into extraordinary flashes of sympathy, awareness, and insight'. D.J. Taylor, "Literary Review".

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
Edition: Main Market
Publisher: Picador
Published: 02 Sep 2005

ISBN 10: 0330433288
ISBN 13: 9780330433280

Media Reviews
Contains the heft and accumulated experience that have made Naipaul probably the most essential English-language novelist of our time.
-- New York magazine
A novel of careful craft ... fresh ideas, unexpected turns.
-- The Globe and Mail
[Naipaul] is a modern master of the multiple ironies of resentment, the claustrophobia of the margins. In a world in which terrorism continually haunts the headlines, Naipaul's work is indispensable.
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
When Naipaul talks, we listen.
-- The Atlantic Monthly
Praise for Half a Life :
Naipaul is a master of English prose and the prose of Half a Life is as clean and cold as a knife.
--J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize
Here, sentence by sentence, is the consummate craftsmanship, the perception, the precision, the style.
-- The Globe and Mail
Author Bio
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and non-fiction, including Half a Life, A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River and most recently The Masque of Africa, and a collection of correspondence, Letters Between A Father and Son. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.