An Area of Darkness
by V.S. Naipaul
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Book Summary Information
Author: V.S. NaipaulEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2002-07-09
ISBN: 0375708359
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of An Area of Darkness
Book Review: Slow-moving memoir of a crank in India
Summary: 3 Stars
The author, Sir V.S. Naipaul, won the Nobel Prize in 2001. He is known for both fiction and non-fiction works concerning Asia and Latin America. He was born in Trinidad and is of Indian heritage. Reading the excerpts about his book from well-known magazines to well-known authors gave me the impression that Naipaul wrote well and that his books were excellent. So I picked up this book, written in the 1960's and considered one of Naipaul's classics.
After reading this book, I can only wonder what the reviewers were thinking. Naipaul's prose is often dense and stilted. His narrative style is jerky and anything but reader-friendly.
This book starts with Naipaul going to India for a year or more to work on writing and to visit parts of India including the village from where his grandfather emigrated to Trinidad. He wrestles with a typical 3rd world bureaucracy trying to import some booze. This episode was humorous although I don't think the author was particularly trying for humor. Then Naipaul settles into a hotel near a lake and takes occasional side-trips. Then Naiapul leaves the hotel, travels through India a bit more, and then leaves. That's about it for the action.
This book does include long passages on the after-effects of British colonialism, commentaries on the caste system, and quite a bit of cranky complaining about the culture of India beginning with a rant on the Indian proclivity for defecating anywhere and everywhere and not cleaning up. I've never been to India, so I can't comment on the veracity of this account.
But the book took a long time to cover a very few subjects. Occasionally there would be passages or incidents that were funny or invoked despair or thought. But these passages were not the rule and there were too many pages in-between of filler about the hotel staff or Kipling's influence.
I did finish the book, and there were note-worthy parts, just not as many as I had been led to believe. I love travel writing, I enjoy cranky accounts more than gushing accounts (try Thubron and Theroux). But I honestly doubt I will read any other books by this author. So overall, a grudging 3 stars.
Summary of An Area of Darkness
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.
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