conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a plot for a book about Seeds, Magic, Half entitled Magic Seeds?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Magic Seeds: Magic Seeds is a sequel to Naipaul\'s 2001 novel Half a Life.\nMagic Seeds takes over where "Half a Life" left off – with Willie Somerset Chandran, a transplanted Indian, living with his sister Sarojini in Berlin.\nHe was forced to come to Germany after a revolution in an unnamed African country (presumably Mozambique) forced him into exile.\nHe had spent 18 years in Africa, and is ill at ease in the urban European setting.\nHis sister arranges for him to return to India and become involved with communist guerrillas over there.\nHe accepts this mission, but without any real sense of commitment to the rebels cause.\nHe is quickly disillusioned with the guerrillas – their personal shortcomings and the ill-advised tactics of the movement – but remains involved with them partly out of inertia and partly out of fear that his former comrades might kill him.\nEventually he gets captured and imprisoned, and finds life in prison preferable to a life on the run.\nHe gets released from the prison when his English friend Roger arranges for an old collection of his short stories to be republished, which causes some embarrassment to the Indian government.\nWillie moves to London, and there he finds himself in an upper-middle class social set, and he slowly drifts into the life in the suburbs, with all its ironies and quiet sense of claustrophobia.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: \nWillie moves to London, and there he finds himself in an upper-middle class social set, and he slowly drifts into the life in the suburbs, with all its ironies and quiet sense of claustrophobia..\nHe gets released from the prison when his English friend Roger arranges for an old collection of his short stories to be republished, which causes some embarrassment to the Indian government.\nEventually he gets captured and imprisoned, and finds life in prison preferable to a life on the run.\nHe is quickly disillusioned with the guerrillas – their personal shortcomings and the ill-advised tactics of the movement – but remains involved with them partly out of inertia and partly out of fear that his former comrades might kill him.\nHe accepts this mission, but without any real sense of commitment to the rebels cause.\nHis sister arranges for him to return to India and become involved with communist guerrillas over there.\nHe had spent 18 years in Africa, and is ill at ease in the urban European setting.\nHe was forced to come to Germany after a revolution in an unnamed African country (presumably Mozambique) forced him into exile.\nMagic Seeds takes over where "Half a Life" left off – with Willie Somerset Chandran, a transplanted Indian, living with his sister Sarojini in Berlin.Magic Seeds: Magic Seeds is a sequel to Naipaul\'s 2001 novel Half a Life
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first paragraph for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Magic Seeds
  The man in the striped trousers (perhaps someone from eastern Europe) began doing the famous unpacking. But since the man was from eastern Europe Willie was not as disturbed as Roger had thought he might be.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She said, "I have nowhere else to go. I know that your father wouldn't mind. And after all these years I regard the cottage as my home."
  I understood what she meant; it tore at my heart; but even then I genuinely didn't want to know the details. And of course in time she got over that crisis and was as serene and stylish and well mannered as ever.
  Some time passed. And then again I began to understand that there was something new in Jo's life. Not a man, but a woman. Someone new on the council estate, or someone just discovered. These two women, Jo and the other woman, had been boasting to each other about the richness of their lives, boasting in the way women boast. The other woman's name was Marian. She was artistic; she made curtains and painted earthenware plates; she infected Jo with a wish to do similar things. On weekends I began to hear about the expensiveness of kilns. Six or eight hundred pounds. I had the idea that I was being asked in the name of art and Jo's general social endeavour to spend some money on an electric home kiln. A business expense, which would apparently be recovered in no time. As it was, Jo was getting almost no return on her craft and art. By the time she had paid for the plain earthenware plates on which she did her painting, of flowers or a dog or a tiny kitten in a tea cup, and then the baking of her painted plates by a kiln-owner on the council estate, the renting of a stall at a craft fair, the travel to the fair, by the time she had done all that, she was showing no profit at all. I imagined her sitting forlorn beside her craft goods at the fair, as an ancestor in long skirts and clogs might have sat in a simpler time beside her eggs in a village market, ready at the end of the weary day to exchange everything for a handful of magic seeds.
  Sometimes in London a go-ahead young art dealer whom you have just got to know might invite you to dinner. And it seems at first that everything in his austerely laid out house or flat is exceptionally tasteful and well chosen, the enviable discoveries of an unusual eye. When at last you feel you must remark on the long and lovely old oak table on which you are dining, you hear that it is for sale, with everything else you have seen. You realise then that you have been invited not just to dinner but to an exhibition, the way a developer might ask you to a show house, for a little more than the pleasure of your company.
  So now it was with Jo. She began on Saturday mornings to undo big, heavy bundles of her work, painted plates, enamel-and-wire work, very streaky landscapes and portraits in wax, charcoal drawings of animals, watercolours of rivers and willows. Everything that could be framed was framed, with very big mounts; that was why the bundles were so heavy.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last three paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: THEY DROVE BACK to the hotel, along the winding road, and they found, to their amazement, that the music was still with them. They could, if they had known, and if a path existed, have walked from the hotel up to the cliff where the abandoned big house was.
  All night Willie heard the music. It invaded his sleep and mingled with other memories. Africa, with the conical grey stone hills and Africans walking on the red paths beside the asphalt road. The burnt-out concrete houses, smoke-stained around the windows. The forest and the men in olive uniforms with caps with the red satin star, and the endless marching. The strange jail where, as on a slave ship, the prisoners lay side by side on the floor in two rows separated by a central aisle. All night it seemed to him as well that he had found something good to write to Sarojini about. This thing eluded him. He looked for it, through all the slave music, and in the morning all he was left with was: "It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling. But I can't write to Sarojini about that."
  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Picador, London, and subsequently in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2004.