Up at Oxford
Continents of Exile: 7
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Book 2 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.
After studying in the United States, Mehta - blind since childhood - achieves his dream of enrolling at the University of Oxford: a place that has consumed his imagination ever since he was a small boy growing up under the British Raj. In Up at Oxford, Mehta recalls the nuances of his conversations, the range of his youthful emotions, and the sounds, smells, and tastes of university life. Along the way he draws memorable portraits of, among others, novelists, poets, scholars, and peers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mehta, the well-known Indian-born writer, affectionately relives his undergraduate years at Oxford's Balliol College in an amusing, wonderfully observant, self-deprecating memoir. Despite his constant struggle to find his footing on the English class ladder, and the inconveniences and frustrations caused by his blindness, Mehta ( Daddyji ) became an irrepressible Anglophile in the small, intimate, yet worldly Oxford of 1956-1959. With tart irony he sketches eccentric dons, his troubled friends (one of whom committed suicide), towering scholars, aspiring novelists and poets. He also plays host to E. M. Forster and recalls how scruffy visiting beatnik poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso ruffled shy Oxford poetry professor W. H. Auden. The volume ends as Mehta, educated in the United States since age 15, passes a harrowing oral exam and makes a triumphant return to India after nearly a decade abroad.
