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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.… (meer)
Heel toepasselijk heb ik dit boek gelezen tijdens een reis door India (oktober 2003). Naipaul beschrijft zijn belevenissen en observaties toen hij er in 1962 voor het eerst was. Zoals hij het beschrijft lijkt de tijd veertig jaar stil te hebben gestaan! Naipaul is erg negatief over Indiërs, heeft geen hoge pet van ze op. ( )
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
To Francis Wyndham
Eerste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
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?'
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
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.
I did not understand the language of our religious ceremonies- it was as if our elders expected that our understanding would be instinctive - and no one explained the prayers and rituals.
In Trinidad, to be Indian was to be distinctive. To be anything there was distinctive; difference was each man's attribute.
It is the special mimicry of an old country that has been without a native aristocracy for a thousand years and has learned to make room for outsiders, but only at the top.
Then I discovered that in the few short weeks of the tourist season, of tourist transistors tuned to Radio Ceylon, his taste had changed. He liked the commercial jingles, he liked the film songs. They were modern, an accessible part of the world beyond the mountains from which the advanced, money-laden Indian tourists came. Kashmiri music belonged to the lake and the valley, it was rude. So fragile are our fairylands.
They walked idly up and down the road, between the admiring crowds, jostling those who tomorrow might once again be their betters.
But to the intelligent illiterate in a simpler world might not literacy be an irrelevance, a dissipation of sensibility, the mercenary skill of a scribe?
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
I felt it as something true which I could never adequately express and never seize again.
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.