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An Area of Darkness | 
 enlarge | Author: V.s. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.60
You Save: $6.35 (42%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 141924
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 0375708359
Dewey Decimal Number: 915.4044
EAN: 9780375708350
ASIN: 0375708359
Publication Date: July 9, 2002
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Shipping: International shipping available
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Slow-moving memoir of a crank in India February 21, 2008
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.
 Naipaul on India February 5, 2008
I read this book in preparation for recent trip to India. While it may be a bit dated, Naipaul writes beautifully. He describes India's people and places as he found them in the early 60's (pre Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and even, apparently, before Nehru shirts were known as such)givin and interesting perspective and historical context to the India I experienced on my recent trip.
Excellent X-ray of am amazing society! June 8, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I really loved this book! It'snot history, it's not politics, it's not a cultural review, it's not sociology ... but all the above in one astonishing piece of jewelry. I loved reading it rom the beginning to the end...
 Boring! May 30, 2006
2 out of 17 found this review helpful
I like travel books that have a sense of adventure, and where one identifies with the writer. This failed on both acounts, and after struggling through half of it a I threw it away.
The ending redeems it March 3, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a book that heartily annoyed me as I read it, but the last 60 pages changed my tune. I would never want to read this book again, nor would I recommend it to others unless they knew what they were getting into--but the endless historical essays on caste and English colonialization did eventually end, and did lead into a really interesting place for Naipaul. One of my chief complaints with the book as I read was that Naipaul kept himself aloof, that so much of the book was abstract historical essay instead of real stories of his travels. There was a chunk in the middle of the book where Naipaul stayed at a particular hotel and got to know the people there, which was really intriguing, but otherwise I was dead bored. The last 60 pages, however, were almost entirely of Naipaul's experience and dealt with the real people he met and the terrible misunderstandings he had. All of the earlier material on caste and colonization had been building up to this point: the point when he visits his grandfather's village and, though charmed at first, ultimately cannot connect with his relations there for the same reasons that he can't connect with the rest of India. Overall the ending was very moving and very powerful.
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