I suppose it's inevitable that readers will compare Naipaul's view of the bush to Joseph Conrad's. Naipaul portrays an ancient African civilization coming to grips with the intrusion of modern society thrust by economic boom into its midst. So the merchants and business traders take the steamer up the river to a bend where the New Africa is emerging. However, deep and primitive aggressions always seem to surface perhaps because they are so imbedded into man's warrior instincts. And the New Africa cannot seem to get beyond this to create a society in which peace and justice prevail. The irony is that such qualities exist elsewhere among more advanced societies, as well: society can't seem to transcend its own penchant for violence. Perhaps, that's because beneath the veneer of the human persona there lies a heart of darkness. Mankind's inability to cope with its brutality and baser instincts represent a challenge not only in the bush. It's a universal battle royal that Naipaul's insightful and brilliantly written novel epitomizes. This author is a worthy Nobel laureate for his work over a period of decades.

É verdade que o tema é a descolonização, o antes e o pós, impactos e efeitos, mas é mais do que isso, é um questionamento sobre aquilo que nos motiva a fixar objetivos, a acreditar em destinos, a procurar mais e melhor. É visto a partir da perspectiva africana, ainda que por um indiano que ali nasceu, servindo o romance para dar conta do seu "coming-of-age".

A escrita de Naipaul é boa mas não surpreende, pelo menos na tradução, já o tom imposto ao discurso esse sim é bastante particular, muito conseguido e coerente ao longo de todo o romance. Não é fácil definir esse tom, diria que é uma espécie de melancolia ausente, no sentido em que as emoções apontam para tristeza e desaire, mas ao mesmo tempo abnegação, permitindo que a atmosfera do livro se eleve, deixe respirar, sem condicionar o sentimento, e sem nunca permitir o definhamento completo da esperança. Como que sabendo que não valendo a pena, vai-se ainda assim fazendo o esforço, ainda que reduzido esse esforço, mas fazendo-o, como que para se manter à tona a respirar na espera por melhores dias. Tenho a sensação que se não tivesse passado por África já algumas vezes, teria dificuldade em conseguir compreender este tom, a mesma dificuldade que senti quando pela primeira vez tentei ver o filme "Terra Sonâmbula", adaptado do livro homónimo de Mia Couto, e que depois dessa experiência vi com outros olhos.

Naipaul consegue recriar a atmosfera africana no fio das páginas, o languido fundido com a tristeza, mesclada com a vontade de continuar a lutar ainda que devagar. É verdade que Naipaul não mede as palavras, é muito direto, roça o racismo, e há mesmo quem não lhe perdoe, mas nada do que é dito pode ser retirado de contexto e colocado na boca do autor. Escrever de modo politicamente correto seria bom para os críticos europeus, mas nunca conseguiria chegar ao âmago, e dar-nos a sentir o que verdadeiramente se sente no interior daquele continente. Aliás o que mais me impressionou na leitura foi exatamente ler a África pelos olhos de um não europeu e de um não-africano, existe uma espécie de imparcialidade que se cola aos personagens de Naipaul que nos permitem ver o que até aqui não tínhamos visto noutras obras com a África em pano de fundo.

“Quando se deu a independência, o povo da nossa região enlouqueceu de raiva e de medo – toda a raiva acumulada durante o período colonial, todos os medos tribais que entretanto tinham estado adormecidos. A gente da nossa região tinha sido muito maltratada, e não apenas pelos europeus e árabes, mas também por outros africanos; e quando veio a independência, recusaram-se a obedecer ao novo Governo instalado na capital."

Houve um momento em que quase fechei o livro, quando o protagonista desata a bater na amante, algo que se cola a algumas histórias que entretanto circularam a propósito do próprio Naipaul. A julgar pela descrição realizada, acredito que o autor o tenha feito nesse seu passado, mas não podemos, mais uma vez, descontextualizar as ações. Não posso de forma alguma defender o autor, mas não posso esquecer o que é viver numa sociedade que aprova e incentiva esses comportamentos.

Inevitavelmente o rio de Naipaul faz-nos recordar as trevas de Conrad, ainda que num tom distinto como já referi acima, e por isso difícil de aproximar. Naipaul sendo melancólico nunca permite a total negrura, não tem soluções, mas nunca fecha a porta, acredita claramente no ciclo da vida, sente-se ao longo de todo o livro, pela boca dos seus personagens, uma crença no princípio budista de que “Tudo é Impermanente!”.


Publicado no VI
(https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...)

This book is as much a story of what it was like living in a newly independent country in Africa in the 1960’s - 1970’s as it is a novel. The book has memorable opening lines: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

The main character is a Muslim from a well-off family, originally from India by way of eastern Africa but now settled on the west coast. He buys a store from his uncle and moves a week’s journey upriver and inland, toward the east. The family has slaves that they are ‘responsible for’ so when he moves inland he has to take a young man, a slave, with him, even though he’d rather leave him behind. His store sells household goods to the locals as well as to those who arrived by the big weekly riverboat and by dugout canoes from the interior.

A lot of the town, located at a bend in the river, is burned and in ruins but he and his uncle are confident it will come back. Those who are left in town are like a mini-United Nations: most of the businesses are owned by Arabs, Indians, Belgians, Greeks and Portuguese. But it’s not a melting pot. A major theme is that everyone is of ‘two worlds.” Like the main character being of Indian and African ancestry. And the Africans from the bush are halfway between the bush world and that of the town.

The town starts to thrive again and even gets an international burger chain restaurant. The main character befriends a young man whose mother is a trader by dugout. She wants her son to stay in town to get an education. Much of the story concerns his relationship with these two young men who work in his store.

The country is run by an African leader. The bizarre behaviors of the African leader provide some humor and horror. The President’s PR person lives in the town with his wife (they are British) but he appears to have fallen from favor with the President. (Eventually the main character has an affair with the man’s wife.) The President uses white Belgian mercenaries to do some of his dirty work. When he decides he wants a change of leadership in the local military garrison, the Belgians come to town and go into the garrison and kill the African commanders.

The President creates a type of prep school in the town, to which the African boy from the bush is admitted. But eventually the President loses interest in it and the school falls into disrepair. The President hires a white man to travel with him through the country and always be the first off the boat or train to run out into the crowd and ‘draw off the evil.’ The President makes his mother a universal symbol of womanhood and turns her into a cult figure in a process like a form of Mariolatry.

Eventually the main character’s business is ‘nationalized.’ He is still employed as the manager but the firm is now run by an African appointed by the President. He knows it’s time to get out so he starts smuggling gold and elephant tusks on the side and stashing his money in an international bank so he can get out on a moment’s notice – which in the end, he barely does.

There is good writing and big thoughts:

“The Europeans wanted gold and slaves like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves….they got both the slaves and the statues.”

Of the Africans living in the forests: “I knew other things about the forest kingdom, though. I knew that the slave people were in revolt and were being butchered back into submission. But Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away.”

“It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There is no right.”

There are stereotypes of Africans such as of a young man who is employed in a restaurant. “Yet as soon as he was left alone he became a different person. He went vacant. Not rude, just vacant. It made you feel that while they did their jobs in various glossy settings, they were only acting for the people who employed them…the job itself was meaningless to them…”



All in all I found it fascinating. A good read that kept my attention all the way through while I learned a lot. I’m adding it to my favorites.

Photo of the author (1932-2018) from bbc.com

FIUME DI TENEBRA


L’ansa del fiume.

Il mio primo incontro con Naipaul che aveva appena vinto il premio Nobel. Sono seguite un altro paio di letture, ma non mi sono piaciute tanto quanto questa.

Mi ha colpito subito l’ambientazione, che Naipaul non definisce mai, come se la volesse tenere nascosta, o camuffare, ma che presto innesta il gioco delle somiglianze. E allora si finisce facilmente per approdare nel Congo, all’epoca Zaire, sotto il dittatore Mobutu, nella città di Kisangani, sull’ansa del fiume Congo.
Una delle anse, trattandosi di fiume molto sinuoso.
Altro aspetto che mi ha colpito e affascinato è il protagonista Salim, con le sue origini di arabo indiano, o indo-arabe.



Una comunità di origine indiana che si è insediata da lungo tempo sulla costa orientale africana, senza però riuscire davvero a inserirsi nel contesto umano, continuando a restare gruppo a sé. Sono per lo più commercianti e mercanti. Sono stati talvolta (spesso?) mercanti di schiavi, negrieri.
Il continente si sta liberando dal giogo colonialista, ci sono fermenti, rivolte, violenza: “un’alba perpetua”.
Salim, l’io narrante, ha vent’anni e vuole migliorare la sua condizione sociale ed economica. Rileva da un amico un negozio bottega in una città nel centro dell’Africa, in un paese che è in pieno sommovimento. È molto probabile che il negozio sia stato distrutto, e/o saccheggiato: ma lui in ogni caso deve farlo ripartire da zero. Cominciare daccapo.



Parte in auto e attraversa mezzo continente, un viaggio di una settimana, dalla costa al centro dell’Africa, nella città alla curva del grande fiume.
L’accostamento spesso fatto con Conrad e con uno dei suoi capolavori, Heart of Darkness, non è così azzardato: Naipaul è bravo a costruire e mantenere la tensione per le quasi trecento pagine del romanzo, spesso alludendo più che nominando, seminando presagi più che accadimenti.
Il viaggio di Salim è simmetrico e opposto a quello di Marlow che risalì il fiume Congo partendo da ovest, dall’oceano Atlantico: Salim invece parte da est, dall’oceano Indiano.
La sua mèta si identifica con la città di Kisangani, che Conrad chiamava Stanleyville.



Il servitore Metty, un ragazzo meticcio, che a un certo punto sceglie di tradire Salim denunciandolo per commercio illegale di avorio.
La mercante congolese Zabeth che sale e scende lungo il fiume sulla sua zattera, arriva per vendere la sua merce, riparte dopo averne acquistata altra, un po’ maga un po’ navigatrice: un giorno presenta a Salim suo figlio Ferdinand che è venuto per frequentare il liceo, e gli chiede di tenerlo d’occhio, glielo affida. Il missionario belga padre Huismans che colleziona maschere africane, destinato a sorte tragica. Il Grande Uomo, dietro cui si nasconde il dittatore Mobutu, che vuole cancella re il passato coloniale, ma il presente che introduce è altrettanto oscuro e violento. Yvette, la donna bianca di cui s’innamora Salim, e della quale diviene amante, moglie di un europeo: la relazione dura poco, una meteora.
E Salim parte per Londra.



Quando torna troverà che il suo negozio è stato nazionalizzato, e quindi espropriato. E troverà che Ferdinand, il figlio di Zabeth, è diventato un giovane funzionario al servizio del dittatore, che gli darà una mano, anche se l’aiuto è per sopravvivere più che per quel balzo avanti che Salim cercava.
La spinta rivoluzionaria postcoloniale s’è esaurita (presto), il Grande Uomo non ha mantenuto promesse e proclami, l’odio per il bianco ha accecato lo sguardo verso il futuro, e si è riproposta la solita legge del più forte e del più prepotente: come il fiume Congo con le sue curve e la sua vegetazione risucchia e si riprende ciò che l’uomo costruisce, così il cuore nero ha spazzato via sogni e speranze. L’alba è tornata a essere notte.


Felix Vallotton: Les Andelys (un particolare sulla copertina della mia edizione).

This was my college's required summer reading for incoming freshmen back in 1981. It gave me altogether wrong expectations of how culturally aware my tiny liberal arts school was. And of course no one else had read the book, not even the group counselor, so it was a classic summer-reading experience!

No rating, I'm letting this one go. It's holding me back from reading. Perhaps some other time.

Read this soon after it appeared, my copy from Providence, RI in 1985. The title refers to the "centre of the continent"(20), where Naipaul's Indian I-narrator moves from the coast his ancestors settled. Naipaul lived in Africa when writer in residence at a Uganda university, and he travelled widely. Bend in the River is acutely in touch with African realities, while Bellow's Henderson is not: but, Bellow's is the better work.

I delayed reviewing Bend, which I find the only VSN I've read ( nearly 20) that's depressing, despite his usual genius with character types--the rich Indra who feels homeless, uses air flights to "adjust to his homelessness"(228); the ethtusiastic Nazruddin, "People looking for a broken man were disappointed" having fled through the bush (22); the tall woman Zabeth who buys from the narrator and takes goods up a small river, surprisingly seen locally as a magician (34); Mustafa the large black servant (themselves considered slaves, centuries of servitude) who carried little "I" on his shoulders, but when taunted by other boys, set him down, "encouraged me to fight, and when things got too hot for me, would lift me out of reach of the boys' feet and put me again on his shoulders"(13).

As in all his works, VSN here approves English colonialism (especially in his ancestral India, where VSN faults Hinduism for making achievement and mobility impossible--see Among the Believers); he is roundly detested by third world critics, for sentiments like:
"an Indian pilot led Vasco da Gama from East Africa to Calicut, the very word 'cheque' was first used by our Persian merchants-- if I say these things it is because I have got them from European books. Without Europeans, I feel our past would have been washed away, like the scuff marks of fishermen on the beach outside our town"(12).

When he finds that Nazruddin had a wife and kid, whom he was willing to abandon, the narrator tells him he cannot, but Nazruddin changes, no longer carefree and as optimistic. Resposibility had soured him. "And I too, breaking out of old ways, had discovered solitude and the melancholy which is the basis of religion"(108).

I listened to this on audible, while driving. I don't drive that much - and I've had to use much of my driving time for more pressing items. So this took me forever. But I listened to it so closely, that rather than losing the thread, it was like reading it twice. Naipaul's voice is a voice of such genuine intelligence and clarity -- such a human sympathy for characters and such a careful grasp of plotting -- that I was immediately awed by it. If you've never read this, then you have a treat in store. Nadine Gordimer says Mr. Biswas is even better, though. I know that Naipaul himself is a controversial figure -- but he is a wonderful writer. A natural.


(This is going to be my current drive-time listen -- and so far, it has quite grabbed me. Clarity of prose and clarity of mind...)

This is a lousy boring book. Naipaul seems very interested in telling us How The World Works, or at least how it works in Africa (he does know Africa is a continent and not a country, right?) The problem, though, is that this is ostensibly a novel and not a work of non-fiction, and Naipaul isn't a very good storyteller. He mostly narrates rather than dramatizes. There are long, long passages where there is no dialogue, which would be all right if something interesting actually happened in those passages.
I always thought it was a shame that Kurt Vonnegut never won the Nobel Prize for Literature. After having read Jelinek's The Piano Teacher and now this book, I think that actually speaks well for Vonnegut.
Oh, and great idea using a river as your central symbol. I don't think that's ever been done before.

“What’s this? Three measly stars for a book by a writer Mr Robert McCrum called “the greatest living writer of English prose” and said A Bend in the River was his masterpiece. And he includes it in his list of the 100 best novels EVER. Like, EVER.”

“Well, you know, a cat may look at a king and blah blah…”

“So what was the problem this time? Or maybe you just don’t like novels anymore? Ever thought of that?”

“Well I guess I thought that VS Naipaul was Johnny One Note. You’ll remember him :

Johnny could only sing one note
And the note he sang was this:

Everything’s going to hell in a hand basket, especially in Africa.”

“That’s it? 300 pages of everything’s going to hell?”

“Well, yeah, kind of. Salim the narrator is totally depressed and almost sleepwalks through the whole thing, except the part where he beats up his girlfriend ('I used my foot on her then'), he sparks into life for that bit. Oh, and the girlfriend says she didn’t mind.

Do you want me to come back? The road is quite empty. I can be back in twenty minutes. Oh, Salim. I look dreadful. My face is in an awful state. I will have to hide for days.

This girlfriend also says this famous quote :

Women are stupid. But if women weren’t stupid the world wouldn’t go round.”

“Ah, I am detecting another snowflakey response here…”

“It’s just the usual thing – it would be infantile to think the author is nasty like his own characters – but it does seem the beating up of the girlfriend was something the author actually did do at least once, according to the authorised biography.”

“But I think it’s a well known fact that VS Naipaul was not going to win a prize for selling the most gingerbread cookies on behalf of the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, he was pretty much a professional curmudgeon. So none of this is hold the front page.”

“Well, I acknowledge that to be quite true. But I’m a bit bemused by how much praise this miserable novel gets. A Bend in the River is an equal opportunities slagfest, everybody gets it in the neck, Africa, Europe, the USA, there’s a general all-purpose sneer and despairing shrug that can feel stifling for a poor reader. Like, come on, VS, don’t you have a good word for anything? No? But the book itself is a complicated case.”

“How so?”

“Well the author was from an Indian Hindu family but he was born in Trinidad then moved to England. This novel is about life in Zaire, as it was then, under the unpredictable great ruler Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga who had a baffling way of describing his politics : “neither left nor right, nor even centre”. So this is a post-colonial country and Naipaul the outsider is writing about Salim, another outsider. For pages and pages we get generalisations about Africa flung about like confetti and the strong implication is that Mobutu, and by extension other African dictators, are making a terrible job of running the country. But Salim is such a passive whiner – everything is mildewed, my shop is going down the drain, I hate all my friends, I’m rotting away here in the back of beyond which I volunteered to come to. Oh me, oh my. It's impossible to drum up much sympathy for his sorry ass.

Everyone had become more greedy and desperate. There was this feeling of everything running down very fast, of a great chaos coming

and so forth....”

“So to counter the bracing misanthropy of Sir VS Naipaul, Nobel laureate, (you see how the establishment loved this guy) you should probably read Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane next, or perhaps The Little House on the Prairie."

“Well, there’s no need for that.”

“Or Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.”

“No, not Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.”


(Somebody should have told Salim this.)

In his 1979 novel, Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul captures the climate of disruptive & unpredictable transition from colony to a newly independent African country at the center of the continent. The author also portrays the condition of Asians within Africa, people who exist as perpetual expatriates, born in Africa but in no way "African", not accepted as citizens of any country & always keenly in search of shelter elsewhere, anywhere.



Salim, the novel's central character is said to be from a background of Muslim traders & shop owners with roots on the coast of Africa but is now living inland at a heavily forested, bend-in-the-river post that was previously defined as a European administrative center but which is gradually being "Africanized". This transformation has caused upheaval for the few remaining Europeans and especially for the Asians, in this case people from India, whose ancestors came many decades prior to the 1947 partition, a group almost fatally caught in the grip of change.

Naipaul deftly delineates the class system, including the one present within various African tribes and those who are tribally or racially mixed. "Metty", Salim's loyal & rather servile helper at the small shop he owns, is threatened because he works for a non-African.

There are also those like Ferdinand, from a tall, Nilotic tribal group, a warrior people who are seen by Europeans & other Africans as being "the highest kind of African" but they are a distinct minority in the town & thus as vulnerable as the Asians. Amidst the changes, the country's president is seen as the "Big Man", someone ruthlessly using his power, especially on those who had been in favor in colonial times, with unresolved murders a frequent occurrence. Salim considers...

I knew things about the forest kingdom. I knew that the former slave people were in revolt & were being butchered back into submission. But Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder and the muddy rivers & lakes washed the blood away.

In fact, Fr. Huismans, a Belgian priest & headmaster of a local school, someone in love with Africa & its traditions has just been murdered & no one seems very keen to unravel who killed the man. Most of the other white people had been driven out at independence, when...

the region had gone mad with anger & fear--all the accumulated anger of the colonial period, aimed at Europeans & also at Arabs, with every kind of tribal fear reawakened. The local people hated the intruders who had ruled it and they had preferred to destroy the town rather than take it over. Having destroyed the town, they grieved for it. The less educated we were, the more at peace we were.

Thus, statues & monuments with Latin & French inscriptions had been desecrated. Among those left behind, there is a quality of learning to survive, of just "carrying on", that seems pervasive. The president has taken it upon himself to restore such towns, even employing an intellectual European, "the Big Man's white man" & other consultants to add vigor to the restoration process. And throughout it all, the steamship continues to travel up & down the river to the nation's capital, a linkage that seems important to all. There is a vivid description of hyacinths floating down the river, serving as a kind of connective tissue.



I lived in a far more stable country in East Africa, teaching at an up-country boarding school just prior to Naipaul's time in Central Africa, most likely the Congo, and yet much of his portrayal of life in a newly-independent African country seems uncommonly familiar. What made my life different was an American passport, unlike the many seemingly stateless Asians, several generations removed from the Indian subcontinent, including present-day Pakistan. Salim reflects:

Nothing stands still. Everything changes. I will inherit no house & no house I build will now pass to my children. That way of life was gone. I have only been waiting & I will wait for the rest of my life. The flat I live in had been the Belgian lady's but now it has changed again. I felt all the child's heartache at being in a strange place. I was homesick but home was hardly a place I could return to. Home was just something in my head, something I had lost. And in that way, I was like the ragged Africans who were so abject in the town we serviced.

One adaptable Asian character named Nazruddin manages to flee to Uganda & when things disintegrate there, to Canada and then after a business venture fails, eventually attempts to seek refuge in England. In time, a People's Liberation Force ravages the town & those trapped within it, Africans included. This group pledges war against "all capitalists, imperialists, multinationals & puppet-powers that act as false gods." A general disintegration of authority occurs.

Many Africans perish without explanation while others are imprisoned, as is Salim for a time:

Those faces of Africa! Those masks of child-like calm that had brought down the blows of the world, and of the Africans as well, now in jail. I felt that I had never seen them so clearly before. Those faces were not vacant or passive or resigned. There was with the prisoners as with their active tormentors, a frenzy.

But the frenzy had taken them far beyond their cause or even knowledge of their cause, far beyond thought. They had prepared themselves for death not because they were martyrs; but because they were & what they knew they were was all they had. I never felt closer to them, or more far away.

The bend-in-the-river town that once had as its optimistic Latin motto, taken from The Aeneid: Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi, or "he approves of the mingling of the peoples & their bonds of union" was now in free-fall, full of nervous, unhappy people, all attempting to stay out of harm's way, particularly as the president, who is fond of staging executions to test the loyalty of his people, is due to pay a visit to the town, causing further stifling fear & abundant chaos. Naipaul alludes to something similar afflicting the market stalls:

Basins of grubs & caterpillars; baskets of trussed-up hens, squawking when they were lifted up by one wing by the vendor or a prospective buyer; dull-eyed goats on the bare scuffed ground, chewing at rubbish & even paper; damp-haired young monkeys, full of misery, tethered tightly around their narrow waists & nibbling at peanuts & banana skin & mango skin but nibbling without relish, as though they knew that they themselves were soon to be eaten.

I found the evocations of village life & the shifting relationships among the various well-drawn characters in post-colonial Africa colorfully rendered, exceedingly well cast. Bend in the River is a novel I've just reread, having first read it just after it was published, with Naipaul fully in charge of his ample literary gift.



There are a few sections I found less enthralling, including the detailing of Salim's intimate connection with Yvette, the young wife of the much older "Big Man's white man" but beyond that, I very much savored rereading the novel, set in a provincial way-station on the river in Central Africa, at a perilous time when so much was adrift in the lives of the people who resided at the bend-in-the-river.

*Within my review are images of: the author V.S. Naipaul; an updated shot of Matadi, a bend-in-the-river town in Congo; an older image of a steamboat on the Congo river; a version of the novel's cover.

This was really, really good. The story felt very familiar, as I had read Michela Wrong's book on the Mobutu regime recently (this novel takes place in an unnamed country which is clearly Zaire, in the years after the end of the colonial regime). Naipaul writes about identities here: national, ethnic, human, male. His characters struggle for status or supremacy, or even just a little dignity. His themes are Africa vs. Europe, African vs. Indian vs. white, educated vs. uneducated, developed and undeveloped, master and servant/slave. The writing is superb.