Sound-Shadows of the New World
Continents of Exile: 5
Published on 3. December 2020
208 pages
978-0-241-50493-2 (ISBN)
Description
Book 5 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta.
In 1949, fifteen-year-old Ved Mehta -- blind since the age of four -- left his native India and travelled alone to a school for the blind in Arkansas, USA. For the next three years he studied with over a hundred blind or partially sighted children at the school. Here, he would learn how to deal with Western teachers, date girls, and begin to perceive objects by means of 'sound-shadows'. Sound-Shadows of the New World brilliantly traces the emigrant experience amid the difficult transition from adolescence into adulthood.
In 1949, fifteen-year-old Ved Mehta -- blind since the age of four -- left his native India and travelled alone to a school for the blind in Arkansas, USA. For the next three years he studied with over a hundred blind or partially sighted children at the school. Here, he would learn how to deal with Western teachers, date girls, and begin to perceive objects by means of 'sound-shadows'. Sound-Shadows of the New World brilliantly traces the emigrant experience amid the difficult transition from adolescence into adulthood.
Reviews / Votes
Mehta's touching, often funny and always fascinating odyssey provides us with a unique picture in prose as pure and lambent as lake water * Kirkus Reviews * His fall into blindness had broken open his perception so that nothing escapes him . . . he has a clarity that is sometimes like clairvoyance -- Peter Ackroyd Well-chosen details represent more than themselves... The trick is to choose the details, which Mehta does with consummate, sly skill -- Michael Wood A fabulous achievement -- London Review of Books Intelligent, critically observing ... extraordinary -- Janet Malcolm, in praise of Continents of ExileMore details
Series
Edition
Digital original
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Penguin Books Ltd
Edition type
Digital original
File size
2,01 MB
ISBN-13
978-0-241-50493-2 (9780241504932)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Ved Mehta is a journalist, novelist, and one of the most prolific memoirists of the twentieth century. Blind since the age of four, Mehta spent his early years in India, before first moving to America, where he studied at Harvard, and then to Britain, where he studied at Oxford. A MacArthur Prize fellow and member of the British Royal Society of Literature, he was a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine for over thirty years. His 27 books include the acclaimed multi-volume memoir Continents of Exile.
