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An area of darkness by V. S. Naipaul
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An area of darkness (original 1964; edition 1975)

by V. S. Naipaul

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8431725,577 (3.67)39
A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul's profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland.Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by internationally acclaimed author Paul Theroux.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 acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. This may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.… (more)
Member:welchcollection
Title:An area of darkness
Authors:V. S. Naipaul
Info:Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1975.
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An Area of Darkness by V. S. Naipaul (1964)

  1. 00
    Something of Myself For My Friends, Known and Unknown by Rudyard Kipling (zasmine)
    zasmine: Cross-referenced by Naipaul in his book 'An area of darkness'
  2. 00
    A Passage to India by E. M. Forster (zasmine)
    zasmine: Cross referenced by Naipaul in 'An area of Darkness'
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» See also 39 mentions

English (16)  Dutch (1)  All languages (17)
Showing 1-5 of 16 (next | show all)
you can't go home again, even if it was just your imagined home. ( )
  farrhon | Nov 16, 2023 |
Having never been to India, I feel bad criticizing a travel writer about their perceptions of the country. Unfortunately, I found V.S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India to be disparaging, hypercritical, and persnickety.

I had previously read Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas and Miguel Street, two books I enjoyed despite having some of the same criticisms. I had also read several criticisms that point out Naipaul's pro-British, pro-colonialist attitudes. Those attitudes were on full display in this treatment of India. Every person he meets is portrayed as a one-dimensional beggar who is stuck in their misguided, antiquated ways.

In the book, Naipaul acts like a man staring out a window, casting judgments on the world around him. Reading his negative quibbles was quite a chore. Naipaul is a gifted writer and his prose can be lovely, but this wasn't enough to save the book from his constant grumbling about the uneducated people around him.

In this book, it is easy to see why many critics have found disfavor with Naipaul. The racism he shows here is less apparent than in A Bend in the River or in some of his essays, but his colonialist attitudes are on full display. ( )
1 vote mvblair | Apr 18, 2023 |
I found this one of the more enjoyable Naipaul books with his searing description of India and the Indians, and the poetic writing. There were many memorable phrases eg. 'sensationally unwashed people'. This phrase alone is indicative of Naipaul's brutal description of India, some of which seem funny and comical but is in reality, a harsh indictment of the country. He explains how the caste system leads to India's lack of progress. Enlightening for a foreigner like me, but understandably distasteful for a citizen of the country. There were some difficult chapters. In the end, India remains an area of darkness to him, and to us. ( )
  siok | Sep 11, 2022 |
'An Area of Darkness' is a masterpiece of travel writing and personal memoir. Although it dates back as far as the 1960s, it is still an enormously valuable book that serves as a model for anything and everything travel-related since. ( )
  soylentgreen23 | Feb 24, 2021 |
If one can imagine the difficulties Naipaul suffers now in a period in which the principle of 'free speech' is being eroded by nice white people to 'you can say what you like as long as we agree with it', it speaks buckets for this book that he experienced the 'censorship of the offended' the very moment it appeared. Banned in India and still banned over fifty years later.

This sits badly with me, not only because of the issue of free speech, but also because he didn't look at all at the side of India which is truly dark. He could so easily have talked of the violence and exploitation, but he left it unsaid. He spoke only of what he saw and how he felt. A travelogue filled with angst, not only towards the India which so upset him, but also towards himself. No doubt one learns a lot about one's own inadequacies in such a situation and Naipaul doesn't shrink from them one bit. I don't really understand why people who see this as only a personal critique of India, don't understand this. Neither writer nor subject come off well in this encounter. There are only losers, but why should it be any other way?

For the rest, please go here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/an-area-of-darkness-by-vs... ( )
  bringbackbooks | Jun 16, 2020 |
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To Francis Wyndham
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As soon as our quarantine flag came down and the last of the barefooted, blue-uniformed policemen of the Bombay Port Health Authority had left the ship, Coelho the Goan came aboard and, luring me with a long beckoning finger into the saloon, whispered, 'You have any cheej?'
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For me the East had begun weeks before. Even in Greece I had felt Europe falling away. There was the East in the food, the emphasis on sweets, some of which I knew from my childhood; in the posters for Indian films with the actress Nargis, a favourite, I was told, of Greek audiences; in the instantaneous friendships, the invitations to meals and homes.
And it was clear that here [Egypt], and not in Greece, the East began: in this chaos of uneconomical movement, the self-stimulated din, the sudden feeling of insecurity, the conviction that all men were not brothers and that luggage was in danger.
Here [Egypt] was to be learned the importance of the guide, the man who knew local customs, the fixer to whom badly printed illiterate forms held no mysteries.
The Pyramids, whose function as a public latrine no guide book mentions, were made impossible by guides, 'watchmen', camel-drivers and by boys whose donkeys were all called Whisky-and-soda.
Then came the tedium of the African ports. Little clearings, one felt them, at the edge of a vast continent; and here one knew that Egypt, for all its Negroes, was not Africa, and for all its minarets and jibbahs, not the East: it was the last of Europe.
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A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul's profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland.Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by internationally acclaimed author Paul Theroux.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 acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. This may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.

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