Volume 24, Number 12 · July 14, 1977
India's Long Night
By Robert Towers
India: A Wounded Civilization
by V.S. Naipaul
Knopf, 191 pp., $7.95
There are numerous passages in Naipaul's earlier book on India, An Area of Darkness (1964), that bring to mind Sterne's archetypal traveler. The book, which occasioned great offense among Indians, is written out of an exacerbated sensibility that seems to quiver with perpetual irritation and disgust. It begins with outrage, which quickly mounts to hysteria, over the author's entanglement with an absurd bureaucracy that has impounded two bottles of his liquor. It ends (apart from a brief epilogue) in Naipaul's self-disgust over his precipitate flight from threatened entanglement—this time with impoverished and importunate relatives in the village from which his grandfather had emigrated to Trinidad more than sixty years before. When he is not bickering with petty officials or guides or inn-keepers, he often gives the impression of a fastidious man picking his way along a path strewn with human excrement:
Review, 2891 words
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