Magic Seeds
VS Naipaul
Picador
2004
Fiction
Pages: 294
Price: Rs 495
ISBN: 0375407367
Hardcover, Paperback
Boredom kills. It can also hurtle a person along paths that he would have not taken if good sense in the guise of boredom prevailed. In this strangely two-toned novel, VS Naipaul charts the trajectory of a man whose inertia is so overpowering that it leaves a trail of inaction in the most active of surroundings. And the perpetrator of all things going awry has his source in two tight sentences: “It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts.”
Willie, a man who after a life in Britain and hitching on to his sister in Berlin after a failed life in Africa, goes to India after 30 years to partake in a never-unfolding revolution. His sister Sarojini is Radical Chic incarnate, egging her brother along to do something with his life, to “think not only of yourself but others”. So Willie returns to India and enters a world whose task is to turn the world right — in other words, upside down.
For Naipaul, such radicalism is comic. When Sarojini and Willie encounter a fellow Tamil selling roses in Berlin, she doesn’t see a third world immigrant making a living, but someone who is selling roses in Berlin “in order to buy guns” to throw off “a great weight of history and propaganda”.
{{/usCountry}}For Naipaul, such radicalism is comic. When Sarojini and Willie encounter a fellow Tamil selling roses in Berlin, she doesn’t see a third world immigrant making a living, but someone who is selling roses in Berlin “in order to buy guns” to throw off “a great weight of history and propaganda”.
{{/usCountry}}This is really the story of a latter day Don Quixote tilting against the windmills of injustice, not so much because he is appalled by them, but because he is bored and embarrassed of doing nothing else. Willie becomes a skeptical member of a revolutionary group whose cause he really doesn’t believe in.