Up at Oxford (Continents of Exile) [Hardcover]

Ved Mehta (Author)

Book Description

Series: Continents of Exile | Publication Date: September 1993

The history of a generation is recalled as the author remembers his elation and fear upon acceptance at Oxford and reflects on his year there and the extraordinary classmates whom he watched emerge onto the world scene.

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

An engaging memoir of life at Oxford University in the 50's, by the prolific--and blind--Indian-born Mehta (The Stolen Light, 1989, etc.). When Mehta was growing up in India, Oxford was regarded as the training ground of prime ministers, the ``holiest of holy places of pilgrimage,'' but the author arrived there circuitously, via high school in Arkansas and Pomona College in California. Oxford was in a curious transition in the 50's, with seventy percent of its undergraduates supported by scholarships yet residing in glamorous suites of rooms (Mehta lived in rooms that had been previously used by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Harold Macmillan), living rather grandly on credit, and celebrating eccentricity, conversation, wit, and the life of the mind (in these days before the sexual revolution, Oxford was essentially a male society). Mehta says that entering Oxford was particularly difficult for Americans, who came into competition with Englishmen who had been subject to intense training in their areas of specialization--and who were intellectually much older, if emotionally much younger, than their Yank counterparts. Meanwhile, Mehta savored the Oxford life: the opportunities to meet the great; the associations with some of the most brilliant students of his generation; the visits to places like Birr Castle in Ireland, with a hundred rooms and ``just the usual footmen, cooks, scullery and sub-scullery maids, and of course, the housekeeper and the butler''; and the dinners at the Thistle Society as a kind of honorary Scot. This isn't, however, a conventional collegiate memoir: Mehta's blindness, feelings of inadequacy, sense of ``years of rejections and disappointments,'' and ultimate failure to get a First Class degree give it a bittersweet, sometimes slightly forced, quality. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (September 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393035441
• ISBN-13: 978-0393035445
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,959,096 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very enjoyable, November 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Up at Oxford (Continents of Exile) (Hardcover)

I read this book over 5 years ago and remember enyoying it quite a bit. It paints a certain portrait of Oxford and contains many interesting stories. Having graduated from Oxford in 1997, my experience was very different from his and perhaps not as positive. However, I take issue with the other reviewer who disliked the book- of course different individuals are going to have different experiences. Mehta went to Oxford over 40 years ago and clearly during all this time, the university has changed. Regardless of the other viewer's negative experience at Oxford, I highly recommend this book.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Up at Oxford, September 18, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Up at Oxford (Continents of Exile) (Hardcover)

This account of Mehta's years at Oxford focuses on the depth of the upper class English education, and on the fragility of the young men who survive it. Although Mehta doesn't dwell on his blindness, there is a strong unspoken contrast between his own physical and spiritual courage and resourcefulness and the narrow intellectual pursuits of his peers. Best for me was the tenderness with which he recalled his parents' experiences in England while he was at Oxford.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bewitched by Oxford, September 26, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Up at Oxford (Continents of Exile) (Hardcover)

I read Ved Mehta's Oxford memoir while I was a foreign grad student at Balliol, where he had been a student. That explains my overwhelmingly negative reaction to it. Granted, by the time I arrived in the 1990s both Balliol and Oxford had fallen far from the heights they reached in Mehta's day, particularly the former. But I found his glowing, even reverential, account of Oxford utterly one-sided and infuriatingly uncritical. Actually, nauseating is the best word to describe his portrait of Oxford. He admits that he had been in awe of the place since childhood, like so many people from former British colonies (I'm a "colonial" too). But having been there, he should have seen through the image to the often quite sordid reality that underlies it. The impression he gives is that he is hugely impressed that he went there, and you should be too. He describes how charmed and delighted he was by the SOCIAL life of Oxford, and by its traditions and history and general "gaiety". He appears to have loved hob-nobbing with the "Brideshead" types and sipping cherry with the dons and playing croquet in the college quad. Yet he says very little about it as a SCHOLARLY institution. It is a university, after all. Therein lies the essential problem: too many people are drawn to it for the wrong reasons. They are bewitched by Oxford as a social institution, a place at the heart of the British class system that many people who suffer from acute status anxiety find so fascinating. Alas, it lures people with such neurotic social hang-ups from every corner of the planet who admire the intricacies and social elitism of the British class system, which has been honed to perfection by centuries of revolution-free development. If they can make it there, they seem to think, they can make it anywhere! (The worst snob I met in 4 years "up at Oxford" wasn't English--he was Australian!) That's why there are so many obnoxious, slavish Anglophiles about the place. Some, like me, are repulsed by it and become Anglophobes. (Not quite what Rhodes had in mind with his Trust!) Others, like Mehta, never see past the glittering exterior. There's something faintly sad about that. When I finished Mehta's book, I felt a slight touch of pity for the man. He was there and he's had a lifetime to reflect on it and still hasn't figured it out.

If you are an Anglophile who wants an uncritical "insider's view" of the imaginary Oxford (the "dreaming spires" view), then Mehta's will please you greatly. But if you want a thinking person's view of Oxford from a contemporary perspective--one that rips off the veil and exposes it as an ugly, anti-intellectual fraud rife with snobbery, greed and hypocrisy--then you are much better off with Rosa Ehrenreich's "A Garden of Paper Flowers".