Audio only

An Area of Darkness

By V. S. NaipaulNarrated by Simon Vance
Length10h 1m

About this audiobook

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.

Audiobook details

Rating★★★★ 3.9 (7.3K)
Includes Goodreads, Amazon, LibraryThing, StoryGraph
GenreTravel, Biography and Memoir
Length10 hrs 1 min
Narrated bySimon Vance
FormatAudiobook
Publish dateJul 24, 2021
LanguageEnglish

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