Up at Oxford (Continents of Exile: 7)

by Ved Mehta

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780241504956
Publisher:	Penguin UK
Publication date:	12/03/2020
Series:	Continents of Exile Series , #7
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Another volume in Mehta's ongoing Continents of Exile series, this installment is the first to be set in Britain, which Mehta calls his "third spiritual home" (India and America being the other two). Here Mehta details his years at Oxford--choosing a field of study, getting used to the physical discomforts, and meeting and befriending some exceptionally talented young men. Mehta writes in great detail of conversations, events, and circumstances, presenting a colorful chapter not only of his life, but also of a nation and a people during the late 1950s. He is relentlessly honest in his self-scrutiny, detailing the shame he felt about his mother's poor English and Indian ways; his jubilance at tasting gin and freedom; and his despair at ever finding love. There are the fascinating travails of a man who, though blind since almost four years old, declares that he is not blind, "not in the way you think," and proves it in his writing.

Eloise Kinney