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October 29, 2004

'Magic Seeds' Follows Theme Of Powerful and Dispossessed; A Lively Exchange at the Launch
By SANGI TAA ADVANI | SPECI AL TO THE W ALL STREET J OURNAL

BOMBAY, India -- It isn't every day that a Nobel Prize-winning author, and a knighted one at that, comes home to the country of his forefathers. Never mind that Vidia Naipaul ("V.S. Naipaul" on the book jackets) is Trinidadian by birth or British by adoption: For the book lovers of Bombay, he's Indian, and they flocked Oct. 15 to see him launch his most recent novel, "Magic Seeds." A frail 72 years old, he sat beside his wife, Nadira, on the podium at Crossword Bookstore, seeming tired out by the thick air of expectations exhaled by an eager audience, amid flapping volumes waiting to be signed. Sir Vidia is never at ease with speaking in public -- his remarks are often construed as racist and homophobic. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in 2001, he argued that it was futile to use the man to illuminate the work: "It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly 50 years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books." Here he repeated this, more roughly: When a young lady in the audience asked him to talk about the controversy his books sometimes arouse, he snapped, saying it was obvious, from the tone of her question, that she had not read his work. The books number more than 25, spanning the West Indian island of Trinidad, India, Africa, North and South America, the wide arc of Muslim nations and England. In them, Sir Vidia is a far better navigator of IN HIS OWN WORDS the world than through his spoken words, though he The Simple and the Complicated has recorded harsh and unfashionable opinions about the colonized world (based on firsthand observation) in such nonfiction books as "India: A Wounded Civilization," "A Turn in the South," "Among the Believers" and "India: a Million Mutinies Now." In his novels, autobiographical in parts, such as "A House for Mr. Biswas," "The Enigma of Arrival" and "In a Free State," Sir Vidia's tone is apparently gentler. But dig a little deeper and you find the same haunting pessimism. It can't be wished away, because it too stems from a stern, scrupulous assessment of life around him, in all its shades and nuances. The subject of all, in one form or another, is the writer's unwincing examination of identity. In a jumbled-up, postcolonial world, he relentlessly excavates the terrain of his own past and asks, Where is home? In this high-tech bookstore, for the young, upwardly mobile audience -- the face of a confident, new India that knows colonialism only from a history book -- Sir Vidia, in his Englishman's clothes and Oxford accent, could seem a laughable atavism. But only for a fleeting moment.

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Enigmatic Naipaul Travels Two Worlds In His Latest Book - WSJ.com

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Through the tall panes that flank the street front, you could see a formless frosting from little noses: Street children, who live on the pavement outside this little slice of Manhattan life, were pressing their smiling faces to catch a glimpse of a man they took to be a Bollywood film star (why else would there be so many cameras?). The world of exclusion, of dispossessed people ("the bush" or "the areas of darkness," as Sir Vidia puts it), is always lurking just beyond the glass. Sir Vidia is still relevant now, because he forces you to look. In "Magic Seeds," the author continues to weave the story of Willie Chandran, the main character of a preceding novel, "Half a Life." A failed, ambitionless writer, he has returned to his sister, Sarojini, in Berlin, after 18 years in a crumbling state in Africa. This new world appears to be simpler than the one he has just left, but Willie's sister will not let him be. She wants to infuse some purpose, however warped, into his life. While she and her husband conveniently live off the German dole, she will not allow Willie to "pretend to be a part of this rich new place." (That means learning to drink whiskey and wine, driving a car and feeling "like the people in the advertisements.") So the eternal drifter, stoked by borrowed dreams, goes to India to join a guerrilla movement, a cause that he doesn't even believe in. This pitting of the simple versus the complicated world of course isn't that simple. How did a certain group of people get to be on one side of the glass, and not on the other? "Magic Seeds" becomes memorable because it shows that Willie's predicament is universal: In today's global village, it's Eastern Europeans and other Europeans, not just former colonials, who are breaking down the Wall. But as Willie finds out, getting to the other side, riding on a cause without knowledge or self-awareness, can bring you deeper unhappiness. "Magic Seeds" is a fast-paced book, written in a cinematic sweep, scene upon scene. As Sir Vidia warns, it's easy to miss a few things. Certainly, its tight prose and spare language require a careful reader. But once you begin the book, it is hard to put down and is easily read in a single swoop. There is a scene that stands out. Willie goes to kill a peasant, Raja, an accomplice-turned-betrayer. The description of the killing is so minimal, so stark, that you could almost miss it; there is no blood, no gore, no drama. "And when the shot was fired, and Raja's head became a mess, the elder brother's eyes popped as he stared at the ground. That was how they left him, the elder brother, staring and pop-eyed next to the home-made looms." Although its title is borrowed from the fable "Jack and the Magic Beanstalk," don't expect any fairy-tale illusions from Sir Vidia's haunting prose. Soon after the bookstore launch, a leading national newspaper quite tongue-in-cheek described Sir Vidia's presence there in these words: "The venerable writer has come to resemble a well-washed teddy bear, his eyes inscrutably withdrawn into the folds of his face. But this teddy has a bite." "Magic Seeds" is no bedtime story, and offers no cuddly vision of life. Like a nightmare, its purpose really is to wake you up, sweating and startled, from the security of an unseeing slumber.

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