If I weigh up this book against the three major fictional works that I have read so far of the author I have found the writing of the author in this book a cut above the rest. Though I set foot into the V.S. Naipaul’s literary world first through his booker winning book In a Free State and Last year I read Miguel Street too, I found this book more appealing to me from a writing perspective. I am not considering the non-fictional work of the author for such a comparison. A few chapters from his India: A Wounded Civilization had some impressions over me already at a young age.

This book is not for all. There is not much excitement and thrill quotient to get into this book for a general reader. But here I must say that I read this book quite quickly and despite not having very compelling subject matter, I couldn’t put this book down. There is something in the writing of this book. I am not getting an unerring word to describe it but there was unequivocally something in the writing. Maybe I liked its contemplative and solicitous tone throughout. The writing was simple and no clichés have been used and it has a sort of sweep in the narration. A reader in me very much appreciates this sort of effortless and elegant narrative pattern. I could glide over it.

This book is written in four parts. The first part makes a backcloth for the entire novel in the form of introducing the characters. The narrator, Salim, is an Indian-origin man, living in the better part of Africa and setting his business there, He bought a shop from Nasruddin, and set his business there. Zabeth, a strong and fearless woman from the fishing community becomes her earliest loyal customer. Her character portrayal was amusing in the beginning. Her son is Ferdinand and he has been handed over to Salim for some time in his shop so that he may learn something.

The relationship between the characters has been set up very well, all major and minor characters I liked factually as well as emotionally. Here are very few characters in the novel. They are just six or seven. The build-up of relations among people who came together through a twist of fate or out of economic or colonial compulsion was nicely done.

“He was something of a palmist and his readings were valued because he could do them only when the mood took him. He was on a bentwood rocker, rocking unsteadily from the edge of the carpet to the concrete floor. He asked for my hand. He felt the tips of my fingers, bent my fingers looked briefly at my palms, and then let my hand go. He thought for a little about what he had seen. it was his way of thinking about what he had seen rather than looking at the hand all the time and he said, “you are the most faithful man I know.” this did not please me. It seemed to me he was offering me no life at all. I said, “Can you read your own hand? Do you know what's in store for you?”

This book is about the constant fight of civilizations. It is also about exile and aspiration. The after-effect of colonialism in a newly independent state and the concept of emerging Africa has been explored through contemplative discourse by the author. It talks about the old Africa and a new world. Life opportunities for betterment within Africa and outside are a constant fight.
Nazarudin wants to leave for Uganda, for better prospects within Africa,

“Do you know Uganda? a lovely country. It's three to four thousand feet up and people say it's like Scotland with the hills. The British have given the place the finest administration you could ask for. Very simple, very efficient. Wonderful roads. And the Bantu people there are pretty bright.”

It in the latter parts shows the effect of rebellion on the lives and economy of people settled there. The eastern part of Africa has been described in an indicative manner. Salim reaches to England and thinks there of his plans and prejudices,

“In Africa all the course I had paid attention only to one color in nature- the color of the sea. Everything else was just bush green and leaving for brown and dead. In England, I had so far walked with my eyes at the shop level. A town even London was just a series of street or Street names and Street was a row of shops. Now I saw differently and I understood that London wasn't simply a place that was here as people say of mountains but that it had been made by men that men had given attention to details as minute as those camels.”

When he returns, radicalization had occurred at his place in Africa. The businesses have been nationalized and he becomes the manager of his own business. A president is a powerful person. But power has been misused. At times, I found the story taking allegorical form and dictating the meaning and consequences of wrong politics in the name of making a new world, here the word ‘New Domain’ has been used by the author for those insinuations.

A very good reading experience from the writing point of view!

I liked this book for one more reason…
For its simultaneous portrayal of exile, aspirations, and corruption at both individual and political levels!

This book had such a promising start. Naipaul's descriptions of mid-20th Century Africa were great and I think he did a terrific job of highlighting tribalism and what it must feel like to be considered an outsider in Africa. There weren't too many likeable characters in this book. I started off liking Salim because he was a young Indian man who left his home on the coast to go to a town along old slave trails. However, his sexism was too much for me. Obviously Naipaul feels Africa is a dark continent with no hope for the future, I'm not sure why this book features so often on African book lists.

Edited to add: I don't think I will be reading anymore Naipaul books. He is under the impression that there is not a single female writer, both living or dead, who can measure up to him. I can think of more than a few, sir :/

The story of this young Indian trader living in Zaire at the time of Mobutu is well told and very close to reality; I have first hand knowledge of the situation as well as timing, having lived in West Africa for almost 40 years, in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria shortly after Independence of these countries. The end of law and order, and invariably the beginning of tribal wars and military coups.
This book was a great pleasure to read, bringing back many memories to my mind.

I read this book in Central Africa, during my Peace Corps service. I maintain that it is the best, most accurate depiction of Central African society - a broad term, believe me, I know, but still - that I have read.

I found this novel engrossing and moving, and it inspired me to begin collecting Naipaul's other works; all of which are good, albeit not as good as this one.

Naipaul has been criticized for denigrating third world countries and societies. Strange, since he comes from one - he was born in Trinidad but lives today in the UK - but the truth is that Naipaul's greatest sin is, as is too often the case, simply telling the truth. Many characters in this book, for example, feign sophistication they don't have, views they've lifted verbatim from a news clipping which they don't really understand at all, and in many other ways try to grapple with a modern world that is utterly beyond anything they comprehend, as they have only a village-level perspective on the world. These characterizations make liberal white people sitting in the West uncomfortable; but that's their problem, and - like those characters - arise primarily from a lack of perspective of what life is really like on the third-world side.

4/30 here we go....

I hear it sucks.

5/7/09

A total snoozefest.

Naipaul is a Nobel Prize winner?
That's crust!

I did a bit of research on Naipaul as I was reading this thinking, "are you freaking kidding me?!?!" Rave reviews in Newsweek, New York Times.. and on and on and on. The Nobel Committee compared Naipaul to Joseph Conrad, saying, "Naipaul is Conrad's heir."

n  n


Maybe that's just me sticking up for Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness (and fellow Pole!)

Or perhaps it's just me recognizing subpar literature for what it is.

*The best part of this book was a sticky note on page 200 that said, "I can't believe you made it this far"
Thanks, D. Russ!

И трите ми срещи с В. С. Найпол се случват през интервали от 10 години ("Дом за мистър Бисвас", "Половин живот" и "Завой на реката"). Но, независимо от времето, книгите му са от тези четива, след които имам нужда от пауза, време за връщане в предизвиканите мисли и усещания, време за тиха читателска радост от новопреведената творба и продължаващото с годините влюбване.
И понеже съм пристрастна към темата за диктаторите... Действието се развива в началото на управлението на президента Мобуту, един от най-дълго управлявалите африкански диктатори. Никъде не се споменават имена на държави и политически личности - те са само фон на случващото се, отдалечена тревожност, придаваща особена нотка на това, иначе плавно носещо се, повествование.

Salim is a Hindu from an Indian trading family on the East coast of Africa. He decides to move to a country and town most like Kinshasa in the Congo during the violent 1960s and 1970s. The opening lines in the book set the scene of this terrifying story: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

Naipaul paints a town on the brink of chaos and violence with Salim’s shop the centre of the events happening and reflecting what happened to so many newly independent African countries. Salim takes us on a journey of violent change, poverty, degradation, corruption, greed, tribal warfare and uncertainty with violence never faraway. The President of the country the Big Man is an archetypal African dictator. He reminds me of Idi Amin from Uganda.

The story was a harbinger of future Africa and still happening today with corruption, tribal allegiance and warfare, genocide as well as endemic poverty and human degradation.

"The World is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."

These poignant opening lines encapsulate not just the entire novel and the essential predicament, insecurities, ambitions and aspirations of its protagonist Salim (and various other characters) but arguably those of the author himself, the more one examines his life story, output, the genealogy of his ideas and the growth and development of his ultimately problematic and divisive body of work. This constant fear of allowing oneself to become nothing is what is harrowing to Salim as he contemplates the many phases of the small community besides a bend in the river in an African country (that remains unnamed) where he has moved to settle - a piece of earth that had been, "Forest at a bend in the river, a meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilization, the glittering Domain of new Africa, and now this." [The last referring to what is described as a scruffier place than what it was before and looked more and more like an African housing settlement].

To what extent do Salim's racial, class and sexual anxieties echo Naipaul’s own own inferiority complex, racism, xenophobia and misogyny will remain fertile territory for biographers and literary critics. Especially given the high pedestal on which Naipaul has been perched by those who define the canon as also the stout pushback that one has been witnessing for quite some time from intellectuals and writers from the Global South who question Naipaul’s politics and his attitudes. The blunt, anglophile, articulate knower of natives is now being questioned as never before. So while 'A Bend in the River' is to many a highly regarded and complex novel, it is also increasingly a fairly problematic one to modern gazes.

It is hard to find sympathy for Salim who while preventing himself 'from becoming nothing' habitually moans in self-pity and thinks and acts egotistically, and sometimes quite basely. His assessment of the world is cold and self-serving and even when he looks at the travails and predicaments of others there is no real empathy. Naipaul’s assessment of 'Africa’ appears equally oblivious to the enormity and extent of its exploitation, even while at times he captures well the manifestations of that exploitation. But there is no digging deeper – colonialism is just another event and while it invites some attention it is nothing compared to the opprobrium reserved for the callous and ridiculous post-colonial Africans. In many ways this is a precursor to various modern novels that present exploitation as an ahistorical and decontextualized phenomenon - it appears more profound and philosophical that way and, importantly, it is less offensive that way to those who really matter.

At a stylistic and craft level while it boasts the trademark spare, elegant and precise prose because of which Naipaul is so well thought of the narrative can also be incredibly dull and dreary in its long monologues and extended descriptions of things that are neither terribly interesting nor do they do anything for the pace and progress of the story. However, ultimately it is the politics of the books - or what is missing therein - that is of import. I went back to this 1979 edition to closely reread it, as my first impressions had gotten somewhat lost in my subsequent perceptions and opinion forming about Naipaul and his work. The first thing that struck me was how the breathless testimonials and promotional blurbs about how uncannily this novel captures changing Africa are all from White men. Not a single African. Or a woman. Or for that matter anyone else. But this is 1979. Much has been written about Naipaul since then and there has been necessary deconstruction as well as scathing critique - even brilliant castigation - of his politics, his writings (especially later ones), and indeed also his persona. It is hard not to be impacted by all that when revisiting this early work, which is on the whole more widely embraced as insightful and significant. For sure it is definitely far more perceptive and thoughtful than some of the horrors that were subsequently packaged as travelogues. There are vignettes here that are brilliant and worth quoting.

However, I must confess that I have an initial and almost insurmountable problem with novels that set out to (or are made to set out to) represent and capture an entire country - in this case an entire continent. What hubris! Africa? All of it? With its myriad diversities and complexities? Much as we can tell from the description of the locale that the place is styled after a Central African state, there are far too many general and all-encompassing references to Africa. The kinds of references that are then lazily lapped up by those who want to have convenient placeholders leading to tight, palatable and circumscribed descriptions of an entire people, their history and their aspirations. At times it appears to be a template for reductionism.

In her brilliant novel 'Americanah,' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi's protagonist memorably confronts a white woman (at an African hairstyling place in Trenton, New Jersey) who proclaims A Bend in the River to be the most honest novel about Africa. Ifemelu's reaction sums up what many feel deeply about this and other similar books by Naipaul:

"She did not think the novel was about Africa at all. It was about Europe, or the longing for Europe, about the battered self-image of an Indian man born in Africa, who felt so wounded, so diminished, by not having been born European, a member of a race which he had elevated for their ability to create, that he turned his imagined personal insufficiencies into an impatient contempt for Africa, in his knowing haughty attitude to the African, he could become, even if only fleetingly, a European."

I could not help but be reminded of these words as I read page after page of Naipaul's characters, particularly Salim and Inder, describing: the Bush; the transforming African settlement under the General; and (in their eyes) the contrasting spectacle of the lack of self-assurance and awkwardness of the wretched Africans coming to grips with political upheaval and the extravaganza (which they behold goggle-eyed) and calm confidence of the erstwhile empire. This is when they are not busy churning out self-absorbed trivia or lamenting their real and imagined inadequacies. The Metropolis and the Periphery. Brussels and the Belgian Congo. Empire and the Heart of Darkness. Etc. Etc. One cannot help but be taken aback by how often their descriptions of the erstwhile rulers as well as the subjugated liberated miss nuance and are short on honesty. In the 1970s it was possible to get away with it. And to also build a reputation as an uncompromising, gruff, and outspoken critic (very selective of course) of the post-colonial mentality and predicament. No longer.

At first glance the typologies Naipaul employs are obvious and predictable: spiritual, mysterious and rather gullible Africans of the Bush; a colonial rule that alienates but also uplifts (but is never really examined for how it alienates and how deeply does that impact post-colonial economies, societies and psychologies); a post-colonial ethos that is confused, fractured, tragic, vindictive and cruel (but largely, it is made out, due to the caprice and stupidity of the contemptuous post-colonials themselves); self-styled generals with dreams of grandeur manifested in monumental architecture and armies in brightly colored uniforms that are impetuous and lack the code of honor of the traditional warrior etc., - generals who are ultimately utterly fake, Machiavellian and brutal.

While reading this novel it is hard to avoid encountering at times a remarkable mishmash of orientalism, White Man's burden, stereotyping, over-simplification, and the kind of sneering castigation that some international donor organization operatives reserve for the post-colonial states they are working in while converging in cool and exclusive clubs and hotel wings reserved for expats undergoing hardship postings. I commit sacrilege. I give this two stars. The extra star because at times the prose is sublime and also due to the occasional flashes of brutal honesty. That is all I can muster.

With a surname starting “Nai,” Naipaul often follows Nabokov in many bookshops, and for years I had this irrational (and unfortunate) disregard for his work. Naipaul became a byword for disappointment in still not finding Laughter in the Dark; King, Queen, Knave; Despair; or Strong Opinions (I tended to buy only used books as a rule). At some stage, I tried to read this copy, and either because of the time or place I tried or because of the incredibly inane marginal notes and exclamations left by the reader before, I shelved this on the loneliest “never-going-to-finish” shelf alongside its only sibling: another book I will surely pick up again after all. (The Satanic Verses. I had an overdose of Rushdie’s self-satisfied writing style at the time.)

A Bend in the River is the story of the beginning of a nation post-independence. The country is never named, but shares commonalities with a composite of post-colonial African nations. I suspected Sudan the whole time (not realizing that Sudan is not technically a Central African nation) mostly because of the fact that Khartoum – the capital in the central – is at the confluence of the Nile (where it forks into the White and Blue Nile), and because it has an east cost, which the unnamed country has, though the east coast is on the Indian Ocean, so that rules out Sudan as its coast is the Red Sea, but then none of the Central African countries have an east coast at all. The cane-carrying, animal print-wearing (and insane) President is very reminiscent of Mubutu, so there are also echoes of the Congo. Anyway, it’s deliberately obscured.

I think this clouding though most bothers me because it feels like a meditation on history, and what is history without historical context. As well as a confluence of (or bend in, fine) the river, the story is full of a confluence of people – indigenous, descendants of former Arab traders, Europeans, bush Africans, former slaves and their former owners, expatriates, visitors…

The story is a requiem in motion, of anger and fear and patience (as well as inevitability) as the becoming of the country unfolds and meets foreseen violence and ethnic cruelty. The main character, Salim, is a third generation Indian-African with his ancestry tracing back to Gujarat and his future solidly rooted in Africa, for better or worse. We follow his narration as he moves from the east to the heart of the country, deep into the impenetrable central, perhaps deliberately reminiscent of Conrad. The prose is wonderful, and the tension is heavy and omniscient.

For very good reason, if A Bend in the River is his masterpiece, Naipaul was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.

Another great read from Naipaul. I liked it almost as much as A House for Mr. Biswas. I think I'll read more of his books.

Wow!! I remember reading a House for Mister Biseas as a kid but was probably way too young to appreciate it, and never went back to read any of Naipaul’s books. I picked this up on a trip to Nairobi and couldnt put it down. Growing up in Fiji we had to read books like Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe as part of our good post colonial education. But if high school kids in Fiji should be reading anything it’s this book. How an Indian African whose family has lived in coastal East Africa for generations moves into the interior to make a new life in what is probably Congo, just after colonialism has collapsed. The upheavals and the changes are relevant to those that experienced the birth of nations as are the racial, tribal and cultural confusions. A multi-ethnic country like Fiji should have i S students thinking about what identity means and how close things can always come to really falling apart.

The first Naipaul I've ever read. Lives up to his reputation, both for racism and for incandescent prose.

The first sentence is justly famous; one of the greatest opening lines to any novel I can think of. The very last sentence is likewise frightening and strange.

Naipaul - at least in this book - is not just some mediocre bigoted hugely overrated crank like Saul Bellow; his misanthropy seems born of a deep traumatic contact with the world.