- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Books USA; Reprint edition (Jun 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0375708359
- ISBN-13: 978-0375708350
- Product Dimensions: 13.1 x 1.6 x 20.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,967,880 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
'A masterpiece of travel-writing' Paul Theroux 'Brilliant' Observer
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
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.
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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Frank Account of Unpleasant Side of India - Helpful,
By A Customer
This review is from: An Area of Darkness ([Picador travel classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
This is the first of three books Naipaul has written about India - this one covers his first trip in 1962. I felt it was very helpful in letting me come to terms with the less pleasing side of India that I encountered in the course of several fascinating (and often wonderful) trips there - the side of India proverbial with poverty, dirt, corruption and inefficiency, that is tragically a part of any visitor's journey there but tends in some guide books or travelogues to be pushed aside or down played. Perhaps it takes an (ethnic) Indian like Naipaul to be fearless about tackling this. His description of Kashmir was especially memorable. If you like this book, try his other two India books, describing later trips: *A Wounded Civilization* and *India*. While these books will not cater to Western daydreams of a "spiritual" India, they will help the detached reader understand a more complete India, and one without the spin-doctoring.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
still vivid after 50 years,
By
This review is from: An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India (Paperback)
I picked this up out of curiosity and was astonished at the vividness of writing and perceptions. Normally, a travel book this old is simply too dated to be of relevance. Instead, in this book we are treated to a deep meditation on the country with Naipal's novelist's eye and his persepctive as one of the first great writers from the Third World. Indeed, if you know India, this is a travel book that predates touristic India, and so is an entry into history.
But there are so many images that stick in the mind, flashes of humor and melancholy. I will always remember the pilgrimage he went on to see the "miracle" of an ice formation that appeared every year in the shape of a hindu god, though not in that year; the troubled American girl, Larene, who married a local musician in a moment of passion and was now attempting to ditch him; and the retreat in Cashmere, where Naipal got an incompetent cook fired in a fit of rage that he later regretted. Get it. One of the best travel books I ever read.
5.0 out of 5 stars
An outspoken analytical portrait,
By
This review is from: An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India (Paperback)
When V.S. Naipaul returned in the early 1960s to the country of his ancestors, India, he was brutally confronted with a paralyzing caste system, abject poverty, disastrous hygiene and sanitation, endemic corruption and absurd religious fervor.The caste system V.S. Naipaul illustrates profusely what a caste system really is. A caste is not a class, because a class system is a system of rewards. `Caste imprisons a man in his function. From this it follows, since there are no rewards, that duties and responsibilities become irrelevant to position.' Caste also implies a brutal division of `labor' with at its centre the degradation of the latrine-cleaner. The main aim of the sweeper, however, is not to clean, but `to be' dirt. By divorcing function from social obligation, caste becomes inefficient and destructive. Physical efforts (labor) are seen as degradation and have to be avoided. Caste lies at the heart of the Indian passion for symbolic actions: planting trees, but leaving the trees alone afterwards. Poverty, the British Poverty is not felt as an urge to anger or improving action, but as an exhaustible source of tears. For V.S. Naipaul, India was (is still?) the world's greatest slum, with Kolkata as its nadir: filth, overpopulation and tainted money. It stands as an example of the total Indian tragedy and the terrible British failure. The British expressed their contempt for it and escaped back to England. Religion The religious doctrine was not as important as the forms it had bred. Religions was a spectacle (flagellations, ten thousand simultaneous prostrations), `a mixture of the gay, the penitential, the hysterical and, importantly, the absurd.' The pilgrimage to the Cave of Amarnath with its massive ice phallus showed that `the generative force alone remained potent.' Has India fundamentally changed since this disastrous report? Was the treatment of a former `untouchable' Prime Minister a sign on the wall? Our world today needs more V.S. Naipauls, who do not deny what they see and who have a keen eye for crucial political, social and economic issues and psychological impacts. This impressive in depth travel report should be a model for all those who want to learn to see. Not to be missed. I also highly recommend the movies by the great Indian director Shyam BENEGAL.
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