Book description
In 1964 V. S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness, his
semi-autobiographical account of a year in India. Two visits later,
prompted by the Emergency of 1975, he came to write India: A Wounded
Civilization, in which he casts a more analytical eye over Indian
attitudes. In this work, he recapitulates and further investigates the
feelings that the vast, mysterious and agonised continent has previously
aroused in him. What he sees and what he hears - evoked so superbly and
vividly in this book - only reinforce in him his conviction that India,
wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, has not yet found an
ideology of regeneration. 'A devastating work' The Times 'Brilliant'
Spectator V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to
England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University
College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other
profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and
non-fiction, including
Half a Life
, A House for Mr Biswas
, A Bend in the River, The Magic Seeds
and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son
. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
