Naipaul made a point of being darkly pessimistic about the future of the post-colonial world, at a time when many people were intoxicated by what the future might look like. Decades later the jury is still out. But this disturbing novel seemed prescient about many things, especially the fanaticism and doomed grandiosity of the societies that were emerging from the colonial yoke. I would say less that Naipaul was a racist than that he was an extreme conservative. He held the typically conservative pessimism about human nature and possibility. He admired the West for its achievements but also saw a jaundiced reality behind them.

The main character in this book is not particularly likeable. He seems to be loosely based on the author himself, in fact. The constricted life described is clearly one of the possible futures that Naipaul had imagined for himself. There is a jarring scene of domestic abuse and its aftermath that would be seen as risible were the book sent for publishing today. Having read many of his books I am familiar with Naipaul's ideas now. There are a few hammer blows of insight in this book that struck me. His description of the local citoyens after nationalization reminds me of Gulf Arab countries where people have suddenly been thrust into positions of corporate lordship that they are unsure what to do with. I imagine the book would have felt more offensive at the time it was written, before many of the follies of the liberated Third World had become undeniable.

All in all this is a typically elegant and enjoyable read, even though it seems calculated to instill a feeling of melancholy.

The characters felt like matchstick figures to me, somehow devoid of real life. I am not sure why though. The story is powerful and the flow of history is overwhelming, but I couldn't connect and experience it with them, and that was off-putting.

Protagonist and narrator, Salim, lives in central Africa in the 1960s-1970s. He has moved from the coast to run a shop in the interior located at the bend of a great river. It is a postcolonial novel, set in central Africa. The circumstances described in the novel are comparable to what happened in the Congo after the Belgians departed. The country is run by a corrupt President, known as the “Big Man,” who gradually increases his power base to that of a dictator.

This novel is supremely well-written. It is character-driven, so we meet the people in Salim’s circle, and we are privy to his thoughts. The theme is centered on what happens when civilization breaks down. The old rule of colonialism exploited the people. But the new rule is that of a Cult of Personality. It is based on corruption, fear, and oppression.

In this case, individuals who were previously striving for financial gain or recognition for their abilities, living in relative security, end up fearing for their lives. This fear negatively impacts their relationships and ways of interacting with others. We see Salim turn from a typical shopkeeper trying to make a decent living to a man of questionable ethics who is only saved from destruction by his status as an outsider.

The book portrays the basic need of all people to find a safe haven to fulfill their dreams and aspirations, and how social upheavals can wreak havoc on this basic need. This type of situation has occurred in history many times, and not solely in Africa. I cannot say it is a particularly “enjoyable” read but I appreciate its relevance.

The book examines the post-colonial turmoil that occurs in an unnamed African country soon after it's independence. However, this isn't a political thriller. Naipaul takes his time with the story and the pace is fairly leasurely as the both the setting and the characters are introduced and then developed in great detail. The main character is Salim, a man of ethnic Indian descent who relocates to a small town in the central African country. There he buys a small shop, makes friends with other expatriates, and observes the birth pains of his newly adopted country. A minor rebellion is quickly crushed and the newly elected President begins to consolidate his power and become more and more dictatorial as time passes. The tension does ratchet up towards the end of the book

The leasurely pace allows Naipaul to paint a complex picture of this slice of Africa. The culture is described in great detail and you get a feel for the town and it's people. The uneasy mix of modernality and traditional ways stands out quite often: a BigBurger franchise sits near market stalls where caterpillars, grubs, and monkeys can be bought for food. Throughout it all, the vestiges of the colonial past are still apparent. The town is dotted with the burned out ruins of the homes of the European masters who were tossed out when independence was achieved and their statues have been torn down or defaced.

Naipaul has been accused of being pro-colonialism because it's not a happy picture he paints. Corruption is rampant and bribes become the only way to get things done. The number of Government officials seems to increase almost daily and many of them often have little to do except to think of new ways to shake the foreign residents down for bribes. Through it all, the President's rhetoric takes on more and more the trappings of demagoguery. It's not a happy picture, but it's a scenario that has played out in real life a few too many times.

A fairly short, profound, deeply engaging story about society and culture, being an Other (Indian in black Africa), post-colonialism in middle Africa, and the dreams of self-hood and nation-hood. The best Naipaul story I’ve read, and I thought A House for Mr. Biswas couldn’t be topped.

In 1972, Idi Amin began expelling Asians from Uganda. I took little notice until I arrived at the MBA school of York University seven years later where I met a dozen of the expelled Asians.

They all told stories similar to the one of Salim the protagonist of this remarkable novel by V.S. Naipaul. The talked about the political complexity of life in post-colonial Africa and the efforts of their families to maintain their businesses in Africa in an increasingly hostile environment. Ultimately they all failed which is why they were studying with me in Canadian business school. They were certainly more sad than bitter and remembered the Africans who had tried so hard to support them during their time in Africa.

This novel is a masterpiece of authenticity and a great lament for a colonial society that arguably died a death it did not truly deserve.

V.S.Naipaul in my view was a very deserving Nobel Laureate.

Naipaul, despite being so highly revered, is quite possibly more of an ass than Ernest Hemingway. Character flaws aside, this book was a bit slow and I didn't see the significance it promised.

I read this book with clarity of purpose -- it was a book club choice, and I would not let what I knew of Naipaul as a person come in the way of enjoying a novel that is on a "Top 100" novels list certified by The Guardian .

Unfortunately, my view of this work is closer to this reviewer's.

There are books that are known for their depiction of dark characters - Simenon's Dirty Snow, transplanted to Japan in a 1965 film (that can be seen on Youtube!), comes to mind. The writer created an anti-hero by design and it was a study of a mind wired wrong. They worked for me in a different way from A Bend in the River .

A major source of discomfort was the constant stereotyping in the book. An acquaintance smugly told me that Naipaul was prescient an "tells it like it is". I disagree - he was prescient about the country he describes in that it did become hell. That he tells it like it was or is is not a valid conclusion to draw. Not least because "Africans" do not exist, from what little I know. I do not know that continent well, but I can say that it's ridiculous to talk about Asians or South Americans.

It is astonishing that people would find shades of The Heart of Darkness in this work.

I did consider leaving this unfinished, but settled for flicking the pages at high speed. In the end, the only redeeming moments I remember are one character's (Indar's) story of his life. It was a rare passage when I felt for the character.

"Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned, but fiction never lies."

Set in an unnamed country which has recently won independence from colonial rule, this novel centres around Salim, a Indian Muslim whose family had settled in an Africa coastal town where they were traders. Salim is impressionable and believes that his family is mired in traditionalism. In an attempt to escape his family's expectations he buys a family friend's business and moves many miles to the interior to a town on 'A Bend in the River'. There he sets himself up as a trader and in doing so becomes an outsider, watching unfolding events with an outsider's nervousness.

The country's President, referred to as the Big Man, initially rules the country and the town with a relatively benign hand. Impressive buildings are built, young people are sent to schools and universities where they can earn cadet-ships and there is a boom but increasingly the people come to realise that they, villagers living in the bush, town squatters, traders and even the ruling officials alike, are all dependent on the whim of the Big Man. There is no coherent society in the country. There is only one single source of power, the Big Man.

The town when Salim initially arrives is largely in ruins, a victim of "African rage," against imperial humiliation but gradually rebuilding begins and Salim finds himself a modest niche within it. However, it is only ever a fairly tenuous one. Warned from the beginning to sell up when his stock reaches a certain level but despite this Salim decides to try and hold on.

I have read a few other reviews of this novel in which people complained that nothing really happens but personally I think that that is one of its strengths. Naipaul manages to succinctly portray Salim as a simple man struggling to understand the new Africa around him. It is an insightful piece of observation dotted with a gentle touches of irony. Naipaul has managed to create a sense of moral tension despite, seemingly, very little happens.

Naipaul has also created an interesting troupe of secondary characters. Mahesh, another Indian trader. always on the look out for money making schemes, willing to ride out the country's turbulent up and downs as long as he has his wife beside him. A Belgian priest who collects tribal masks, despite them visibly decaying, like the world from which they originated. A woman trader from the bush, Salim's first customer, who begs Salim to look after her son, Ferdinand, whilst he is a student in the town.

Best of all though is Raymond, a white intellectual, once the Big Man's advisor who has been moved out of the capital and now spends his time lecturing his provincial admirers on the Big Man's greatness. Raymond has been used and discarded by the Big Man but refuses to accept that his time of influence will not come again. The Big Man has a genius for manipulation and his greatest tool is fear. As Mahesh says, "It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right."

In contrast Salim prefers to try and avoid passing judgement, to be patient and as an 'outsider' to merely observe. However, when he returns from a trip to London to find that his business has been nationalised and then he is arrested and thrown in jail.

He is rescued by Ferdinand, the town's new commissioner, and warned to leave the town before things get any worse.
"We're all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We're being killed. Nothing has any meaning. . . . Everyone wants to make his money and run away. But where? That is what is driving people mad. They feel they're losing the place they can run back to. I began to feel the same thing when I was a cadet in the capital. I felt I had given myself an education for nothing. . .I began to think I wanted to be a child again, to forget books. . .. The bush runs itself. But there is no place to go."

Ultimately Naipaul offers no hope of perspective salvation for the country's and perhaps Africa. There is no neat ending here and that is fitting because, at least in the short term, the mistakes of the past are likely to be repeated over and over again until hopefully a new generation, without the stigma of colonialist baggage are ready to assume power. As it says in the quote at the top of this review: "facts can be realigned, but fiction never lies".

'A Bend in The River' is a 1979 historical novel written by Nobel Laureate Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, set in an unnamed town in Africa at a bend in the great river, after independence. The novel is narrated by Salim, an ethnically Indian Muslim man, a shopkeeper who believes 'the world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.', and he arrives in this part of Africa, a land of the exploited and a broken piece of nowhere, where political turmoil, and a hellish future is growing.

Salim, buys a business from Nazruddin, who sold him the shop cheap, giving a modicum of relief to the relentless insecurity that had lingered over Salim. Little does he know, what kind of life awaits him at the heart of Africa. Initially, the business is slow, but the town is growing, and as each day passes with the hope of tomorrow's future, a certain balance starts to enter Salim's life, as the shop starts to sell its goods and he meets Zabeth The Magician.

He befriends few people, with whom he socialises multiple times, Zabeth The Magician and her son Ferdinand, Mahesh and Shoba- the unique Indian couple with a blemished past behind them, Metty who returns from his old hometown to meet Salim and join him, his childhood friend Indar who returns a changed man from his university in London, Raymond and Yvette, Salim is constantly affected by all of them and a struggle for identity and survival ensues, and gives rise to inevitable chaos.

The novel starts off slowly, and Naipaul dives into the sea of the day to day life quotidian details-the trade and the sale, the roots of the commerce, the food, the lustfulness, the happiness and the sadness, the slavery, and the haunting depiction of nature - the poetry seamlessly flowing in the bleak landscapes of historical barren lands, The River flowing eternally through the coast warming and cooling the atmosphere, the red paved roads with a rising mountain of rubbish and garbage, distempered walls and blood scattered roads, all amounting to a geographical and historical narrative of the world seen through African eyes and the emotion felt by the African soul, darkened by the pain and terror of exploitation and repression.

The setting moves from one place to another, creating virtual and metaphysical contrasting images of different worlds existing in a country, the blood of rich and poor spilled and flowing in a country ruled by corrupt agencies and self destructive sociopaths, broken by the invaders and manipulators of history, the West dominating the East, The Van Der Weyden building, and the police stations with their aboriginal prisons, and a separate wild world of the Bushes simply referred to as 'The Bush' which sheltered the tribes from being slaughtered by the pseudo progressive officials and militia.

The novel is a narrative of reality, and sets into motion, a textual poetry of its own unique taste and genre, as Naipaul's prose starts to enter the flesh and blood of the reader, constantly invigorating and addictive and it would be an understatement to say that Naipaul is a literary sorcerer, in the manner in which he writes each word and makes its important felt is something that is a near impossible feat to achieve.

After reading V.S. Naipaul's two of the most acclaimed and revered masterpieces: 'A House for Mr. Biswas' and 'A Bend in The River', I can finally say that when I read ' A House for Mr. Biswas' I was enamoured of that novel but at that time I also felt that if V.S. Naipaul is recognised as a literary star through this novel which is undoubtedly masterful, then why is Salman Rushdie being ignored for the Nobel Prize in Literature as being too popular (verbatim by Nobel Committee) ? but now after ' A Bend in The River' I realise that this is what gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature, Naipaul's prose is his towering achievement, believe me not a single word in this 325 page novel is uneventful or clumsy or even indulgent, and I was absorbed and rushed to finish this novel within 3 days.

2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories. Naipaul is a modern philosopher carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony. Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished."
It is undoubtedly well deserved, and I must say 'A Bend in The River' is a Conradian masterpiece which, if Conrad and Tolstoy would have been alive today, they would surely have regarded Naipaul as their successor epitomising the definition of a masterful and unbiased novelist.

'A Bend in The River' is truly Naipaul's philosophical and literary magnum opus which parallels 'Heart of Darkness' in every step on a sentence by sentence level with a flawless and perfect prose. It stands out as a piece of art and cements itself as one of the greatest novels ever written.

A terrifying and obsessively gripping novel that changes the way we look at the world and the history that shrouds it.

"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, men who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."
-V.S. Naipaul, 'A Bend in The River'
5/5

Say there's a bad guy. He's in a book; the book is well-written; fine, there are many books about bad guys. Say further that the book is written by a bad guy. Fine; lots of authors are dicks. Now say that the author is unaware that they're both bad guys. He hasn't written the book he thinks he's written. Now where are you?

A Bend in the River's Salim is a bad guy. He's a bully and a coward. He doesn't know that he's a bully and a coward, and VS Naipaul doesn't seem to know either. In the end Salim saves his own skin, abandoning his ward to violence. He seems okay with it. In one part, he savagely beats his mistress. "The back of my hand, from little finger to wrist, was aching; bone had struck bone." She seems okay with it. She calls him later. "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."

The passage confused me because, from what I know about people, they don't like being beaten without a safeword. It confused me so much that I wanted to learn more about Naipaul. I had to know what was going through his head when he wrote this passage. I don't do this normally; I think books should be taken on their own terms. But this doesn't ring true for me. It disturbs me. What happened here?

What I found was a quote from Naipaul about his own mistress, Margaret Murray: 'I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt...she didn't mind it at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn't really appear in public." So this is where the passage comes from. It's a direct quote from his life; Salim and Naipaul are the same. So this is the truth, right? In its own way?

But whose truth? "She didn't mind it at all," Salim and Naipaul both say, and that still doesn't seem right. It's the truth to Naipaul; is it the truth to Margaret Murray? So I kept looking, and I found a letter from her, in response to the above quote. She says, drily: "Vidia [Naipaul] says I didn’t mind the abuse. I certainly did mind."

So Naipaul is not telling the truth; he doesn't have the truth; he doesn't see the truth. He's the villain in his own story and he's incapable of realizing that he's written the villain in this one.

And why would we read a book by someone who doesn't recognize truth? It's well-written. It's a well-written book by someone who is incorrect about who he is, what the world is. He's telling two stories: one about Africa, one about people. He doesn't know about Africa; he's only visited. He's certainly a racist. He doesn't know about people, either. The situation is imaginary; he made it up to illustrate his twisted, cynical, violent view of the world.

The thing is that this is a good book. The plot is thin, and didn't engage me as much as I'd hope, but the ideas are powerful and disturbing. The writing is something like brilliant. It taught me something about a certain kind of person: the bad kind. To get into the head of someone as corrupt and as devoid of self-awareness as VS Naipaul is, that's interesting and even valuable. He has told the truth; he just doesn't know the truth he's told. Know your enemy, right? Here is the enemy.

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul - This is a memoir of a shopkeeper of Indian descent in a town with no name on a bend in the river in a fictional post-colonial country in central Africa. The writing is dull; the story, what little there is of it, drags. I continually was thinking about abandoning this book, as not being worth the effort to read, but I persevered and finished it. Finally, at the very end of the book, the level of interest improves. Things become politically dangerous for the shopkeeper, so he leaves.

V.S. Naipaul won a Nobel prize. Unbelievable. This book surely had nothing to do with that.