The Stolen Light
Continents of Exile: 6
Published on 3. December 2020
208 pages
978-0-241-50494-9 (ISBN)
Description
Book 6 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.
The Stolen Light engages with the particular difficulties of Mehta's experience: he was blind in a college made for the seeing, he was an Indian in the United States, a Hindu in a Christian environment, a dark-skinned man surrounded by white people. With compelling honesty and humour, Mehta describes his struggles to live an ordinary university life - dating, riding a bicycle, keeping up with his studies - while dealing with incredible obstacles.
The Stolen Light engages with the particular difficulties of Mehta's experience: he was blind in a college made for the seeing, he was an Indian in the United States, a Hindu in a Christian environment, a dark-skinned man surrounded by white people. With compelling honesty and humour, Mehta describes his struggles to live an ordinary university life - dating, riding a bicycle, keeping up with his studies - while dealing with incredible obstacles.
Reviews / Votes
A lively, affecting autobiography * Publisher's Weekly * 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 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
2,12 MB
ISBN-13
978-0-241-50494-9 (9780241504949)
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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.
