Magic Seeds

Zusatztext “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 Informationen zum Autor V. S. Naipaul Klappentext Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul's magnificent Magic Seeds continues the story of Willie Chandran, the perennially dissatisfied and self-destructively naive protagonist of his bestselling Half a Life . Having left a wife and a livelihood in Africa, Willie is persuaded to return to his native India to join an underground movement on behalf of its oppressed lower castes. Instead he finds himself in the company of dilettantes and psychopaths, relentlessly hunted by police and spurned by the people he means to liberate. But this is only one stop in a quest for authenticity that takes in all the fanaticism and folly of the postmodern era. Moving with dreamlike swiftness from guerrilla encampment to prison cell, from the squalor of rural India to the glut and moral desolation of 1980s London, Magic Seeds is a novel of oracular power, dazzling in its economy and unblinking in its observations. Leseprobe It had begun many years before, in Berlin. Another world. He was living there in a temporary, half-and-half way with his sister Sarojini. After Africa it had been a great refreshment, this new kind of protected life, being almost a tourist, without demands and without anxiety. It had to end, of course; and it began to end the day Sarojini said to him, "You've been here for six months. I may not be able to get your visa renewed again. You know what that means. You may not be able to stay here. That's the way the world is made. You can't object to it. You've got to start thinking of moving on. Do you have any idea of where you can go? Is there anything you feel you want to do?" Willie said, "I know about the visa. I've been thinking about it." Sarojini said, "I know your kind of thinking. It means putting something to the back of your mind." Willie said, "I don't see what I can do. I don't know where I can go." "You've never felt there was anything for you to do. You've never understood that men have to make the world for themselves." "You're right." "Don't talk to me like that. That's the way the oppressor class thinks. They've just got to sit tight, and the world will continue to be all right for them." Willie said, "It doesn't help me when you twist things. You know very well what I mean. I feel a bad hand was dealt me. What could I have done in India? What could I have done in England in 1957 or 1958? Or in Africa?" "Eighteen years in Africa. Your poor wife. She thought she was getting a man. She should have talked to me." Willie said, "I was always someone on the outside. I still am. What can I do here in Berlin?" "You were on the outside because you wanted to be. You've always preferred to hide. It's the colonial psychosis, the caste psychosis. You inherited it from your father. You were in Africa for eighteen years. There was a great guerrilla war there. Didn't you know?" "It was always far away. It was a secret war, until the very end." "It was a glorious war. At least in the beginning. When you think about it, it can bring tears to the eyes. A poor and helpless people, slaves in their own land, starting from scratch in every way. What did you do? Did you seek them out? Did you join them? Did you help them? That was a big enough cause to anyone looking for a cause. But no. You stayed in your estate house with your lovely little half-white wife and pulled the pillow over your ears and hoped that no bad black freedo...

Product details

• Authors: V S Naipaul, V. S. Naipaul
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 08.11.2005
• EAN: 9780375707278
• ISBN: 978-0-375-70727-8
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 204 mm x 15 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature