An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

Description

A luminous and challenging work of autobiographical travel writing. V.S. Naipaul describes his encounter with a force in his life which shocked him into awareness of a need for self-examination and self-explanation.

It is perhaps natural that his year-long sojourn in India should have provided such a shock. The experience was not a pleasant one, but the pain the author suffered was creative rather than numbing, and engendered a masterful work of literature that is by turns tender, lyrical, explosive and cruel.

With spectacular narrative skill, Naipaul provides a revelation both of India and of himself: a displaced person who paradoxically possesses a stronger sense of place than almost anyone. He spins his web not so much to entrap his readers as to make them think for themselves.

Author Information

V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He is the author of thirteen works of fiction, including “A House for Mr Biswas”, “The Mystic Masseur” and “The Enigma of Arrival”, and ten books of non-fiction including “An Area of Darkness” and “Among the Believers”. He has won the Booker Prize, the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the WH Smith award and in 1993 was awarded the first David Cohen British Literature Award. His new novel, “Half A Life”, was published in September 2001. Shortly afterwards he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Wiltshire.