The Stolen Light
Continents of Exile: 6
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sixth volume of Mehta's lively, affecting autobiography covers his experiences at Pomona College, Calif., in the 1950s, when, despite his blindness, he tried to carry on the normal life of an undergraduate: joining a fraternity, bicycling, owning and driving a car and dating some of the most attractive girls on campus. Containing extensive selections from the Indian writer's journal, this lyrical narrative describes the student's problems in finding people to read to him and sponsors to pay his expenses, the suicide of his closest friend and his father's puzzling relationship with a wealthy woman to whom he was ``court physician.'' Toward the end, at Harvard, he completes his first book, Face to Face , and starts his literary career.
