Details Books Conducive To An Area of Darkness (India Trilogy #1)
| Original Title: | An Area of Darkness |
| ISBN: | 0375708359 (ISBN13: 9780375708350) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | India Trilogy #1 |
V.S. Naipaul
Paperback | Pages: 304 pages Rating: 3.68 | 1782 Users | 120 Reviews
List Of Books An Area of Darkness (India Trilogy #1)
| Title | : | An Area of Darkness (India Trilogy #1) |
| Author | : | V.S. Naipaul |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 304 pages |
| Published | : | July 9th 2002 by Vintage (first published 1964) |
| Categories | : | Cultural. India. Travel. Nonfiction. History. Autobiography. Memoir |
Relation Concering Books An Area of Darkness (India Trilogy #1)
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.
Rating Of Books An Area of Darkness (India Trilogy #1)
Ratings: 3.68 From 1782 Users | 120 ReviewsEvaluate Of Books An Area of Darkness (India Trilogy #1)
A year spent in India in the early 60's, by Naipaul - born in Trinidad to parents of Indian heritage - his grandfather emigrated to Trinidad.It is quite true Naipaul is incredibly negative, pessimistic and critical of India. It is difficult to expose anything he says as false however. Although negative, he has a wonderful writing style, and tells a good story, although some of his transitions leave me a bit bewildered, and there is a section of ranting I didn't grasp the point of in the middleAfter reading so much of his later stuff, it's a relief to turn to his earlier work, when he was funnier, more enthusiastic and more expansive. The writing and the thinking aren't as tightly controlled, which risks melodrama. I was surprised when Naipaul visited his ancestral village and found out they were indeed Brahmin, as I had been sure that his grandparents had switched caste somewhere on their way to Trinidad.There's a hysteria at the edges of this book, a barely-contained shock at the
a brutal criticism of India. probably very true too at the same time... the first time i've been exposed to Naipaul's opinions and i'm not sure i liked it all. in the end when he visits his grandfather's village, Naipaul sounds very like the Indian he has been loathing throughout the book. he has been very honest to say the least
I approach Naipaul with trepidation. A combination of misanthropy; sweeping observations about an entire people based on limited and selective exposure and negligible background study; a warped complexity and narrow-mindedness; unadulterated Islamophobia; and, a propensity at times to dully describe dull things in long, dull passages have to my mind characterized non-fiction produced in the later stages of his career. And yet we also have masses of anglophone Pakistanis and Indians who rave
Naipaul's arrogance drove me crazy. I was hoping for a portrait of India, instead I got a portrait of an arrogant, racist, insufferable man.
There was a time when I loathed Naipaul, wondering how someone never born and brought up in India can pass such judgements on her so unabatedly, but of course I was naive. Am older and less of a spring-chicken now in such matters.Now, If there is someone whose judgement on India I give a true fuck about these days it has to be his ( Well, may be along with Upamanyu Chatterjees). The rest are mediocre scum floating in their vast post-modern mediocrity. As Vidia himself put-India does revel in its
Observation was a key to Naipaul's oeuvre. To venture among a people, to talk to them, to find out everyday drama, to unearth "suppressed histories" (a term used by the Nobel committee), and to ultimately look... from a certain vantage point that kept changing over the years. In the recent Dhaka lit fest, he mentioned that the three books on India are not a journey into the development of a nation but into the development of a writer. He was being metaphorical. It is ultimately a way of looking.
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