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An Area of Darkness Hardcover - 1991

by V. S. Naipaul


About this book

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. -Publisher’s Website


First line

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?'

First Edition Identification

Andre Deutsch published a First UK edition in London, 1964. The hardcover is bound in black cloth boards with gilt lettering to the spine.


The Macmillan Company published a First US Edition in New York in 1965.


Details

  • Title An Area of Darkness
  • Author V. S. Naipaul
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Peter Smith Publisher
  • Date February 1991
  • ISBN 9780844666808 / 0844666807
  • Dewey Decimal Code 954