An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India

An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India

by V. S. Naipaul
An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India

An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India

by V. S. Naipaul

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

The Nobel Prize-winning author’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India.

“Whatever his literary form, Naipaul is a master.” —The New York Review of Books


Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul’s strikingly original responses to India’s paralyzing caste system, its apparently serene acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. The result may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780375708350
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 07/09/2002
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 304
Sales rank: 281,129
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

About The Author
V.S. NAIPAUL was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession.
 
His novels include A House for Mr BiswasThe Mimic MenGuerrillasA Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the BelieversBeyond BeliefThe Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of DarknessIndia: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.
 
In 1990, V.S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He died in 2018.

Hometown:

Wiltshire, England

Date of Birth:

August 17, 1932

Place of Birth:

Chaguanas, Trinidad

Education:

Queen's Royal College, Trinidad, 1943-48; B.A., University College, Oxford, 1953

Read an Excerpt

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India.
Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul’s strikingly original responses to India’s paralyzing caste system, its apparently serene acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. The result may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.

Table of Contents

Traveller’s Prelude: A Little Paperwork
 
Part One
1. A Resting-Place for the Imagination
2. Degree
3. The Colonial
4. Romancers
 
Part Two
5. A Doll’s House on the Dal Lake
6. The Medieval City
7. Pilgrimage
 
Part Three
8. Fantasy and Ruins
9. The Garland on my Pillow
10. Emergency
11. The Village of the Dubes
 
Flight

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