A Bend in the River

This is a book for lovers of language. Naipaul creates characters and worlds that breathe and bleed from the pages, and the stories are what they become in the background. For those reasons, I fell into this book and enjoyed it, and would recommend it. At the same time, as much as this may be one of Naipaul's most well-known books, I can't say I enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed a number of his other novels. Something about the story itself felt more detached--it was too easy to enjoy the book as a book, but not get so engaged as to be truly impacted. It felt, in other words, like it was lacking the power of some of Naipaul's other novels, though I'm glad to have read it.

So, yes, I'd absolutely recommend it, but if you're new to show more Naipaul, I might recommend starting with one of his other great works. show less

Having finished this book I am now going over it in my mind, bringing it all together and trying to work out what I make of it. To begin with, it is beautifully written and describes Africa and its characters so wonderfully that I cared about them and wanted to know how life panned out for them. On the other hand, the book didn't excite me, I wasn't eager to pick it up again after putting it down to start with, although I enjoyed it more as the book went on. I felt that the first chapter, which dealt with the uprising, didn't pull a big enough punch for me. I wasn't able to grasp the full horror of the situation or the amount of danger the characters may or may not have been in.

The book has many layers which are still relevant today. show more The struggle of ex-colonial countries to find their identity, the charismatic leaders and the bloody violence and fear used to control the population. Above all, what comes through is the impact all this has on ordinary people trying to 'carry on' with their lives and get through day by day. The lack of history is another theme, Indar prescribes trampling on history and not looking back and this is emphasised at the end when Metty talks about the rebels wanting to kill everyone and start again. History should not be forgotten, mistakes should be learnt from, it cannot be wiped out and there will never be a clean slate to start again from.

The end of the book left me intrigued. The characters' stories are left unfinished - what happened to Yvette and Raymond, were they at the dinner party in London with Indar? What about Ferdinand, was he talking about his own fate at the end? Is it happily ever after for Salim? Perhaps they all just 'carry on'. I suppose the symbolism of the last paragraph refers to Africa being cut adrift by its colonial masters, with its people not quite realising their fate until it is too late. show less

V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad but travelled around the world. If this book is anything to judge by, he became immersed in the culture and politics of the countries he visits.

This book is set in an unnamed country in central Africa but it seems clear that the country is fashioned on the Democratic Republic of Congo which called itself Zaire for a while after independence but has reverted to its former name. The time is the 1960s shortly after the country achieved independence from it colonial masters. Salim is a Muslim of East Indian ancestry but he grew up on the east coast of Africa. He comes to the town at the bend of the river to be the proprietor of a small shop that he bought cheaply from a family friend. The town is still show more feeling the effects of the war of independence and business is slow. There are few other non-
African citizens in the town but they tend to band together. Salim has very little interaction with the Africans other than the customers in his shop and the prostitutes he visits. His closest relationship with an African is with his shop assistant, Metty, who is the son of slaves his family owned on the coast. Then one of his customers asks him to look out for her son, Ferdinand, who is coming to the town to attend school. Metty and Ferdinand become quite close friends and Salim is somewhat of a mentor to Ferdinand. The town is becoming more prosperous and Salim’s shop is doing fairly well. However, there is always the threat of violence. The head of the school is decapitated while visiting bush villages looking for African art. Salim’s life is quite lonely and aimless. This period ends when an old friend, Indar, takes a job teaching at the technical school the President of the country has established on the outskirts of town. Indar introduces Salim to the academics at the school and Salim finally feels he is in touch with people who matter. Indar is having an affair with the young wife of the school’s principal, Yvette. When Indar’s job term ends, Salim and Yvette have a passionate affair. Meanwhile the political situation for non-Africans is getting worse. One of the Greek merchants quietly sells out and moves to Australia. However Salim cannot contemplate doing this because of Yvette. Eventually the affair ends and in the final scene between them Salim strikes and verbally abuses Yvette. Salim leaves the town for about 6 weeks to visit the family friend from whom he purchased his store who now lives in London. While there he becomes engaged to the friend’s daughter although they have not even kissed. He returns to the town to sell up but finds that in his absence the store has been taken over by the state and given to an African and he is expected to manage the shop for him. Since he does not expect to receive anything for the shop he goes into smuggling in order to make enough money to leave Africa. When his activities come to the attention of the police he is thrown in jail. Fortuitously, Ferdinand is now the Commissioner of the town and he arranges for Salim’s release and a berth on the river steamer. Salim leaves town with nothing more than he can carry.

I thought this book was very well-written but bleak. Considering this book was written in 1979, well before the horrific events in Rwanda and also the Congo, it clearly shows the roots of those conflicts. One of the passages really struck me as showing how privileged my life is. Indar is speaking to Salim about his world view (page 147):
“There may be some part of the world – dead countries, or secure and by-passed ones – where men can cherish the past and think of passing on furniture and china to their heirs. Men can do that perhaps in Sweden or Canada. Some peasant department of France full of half-wits in chateaux; some crumbling Indian palace-city, or some dead colonial town in a hopeless South American country. Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain.” And so it becomes for Salim.

I probably would have given this book an even higher rating except for the violence in the last meeting between Yvette and Salim. I never feel there is any good reason for a man to strike a woman and in this case it seemed particularly gratuitous. After, Salim has no remorse about his actions and he is treated by Metty as though he is the one who deserves sympathy. I can’t help but wonder about Naipaul’s own relationships with women. I will probably read more books by Naipaul who did receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001. show less

"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 show more 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". show less

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 show more 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. show less

V.S. Naipul names neither the river of the title nor the African country where [A Bend in the River] is set. The anonymity fits, as Salim, the narrator of the story, seems to exist almost completely outside of time, history, or cultural identity. After spending his formative years in a more colonial community on the coast, he strikes out for the interior to run a supply store in a small town in a country that has just undergone a revolution. A European upbringing, a Muslim faith, and an Indian ancestry put Salim on the outside of everything in his new home, and it is from this position that he observes and reports with ever more conflicted feelings about the direction of the country and his place in it.

At his best, Naipul’s writing show more evokes Hemingway, with brief and punchy prose, imminently masculine and bleak. The difference is that Naipul sets up his hero to be just an observer, one who rarely takes a side and rarely does anything but engage in equivocal internal dialog. Where Hemingway’s characters run recklessly head-long into life, Naipul’s characters walk the high-wire of inaction, always calculating the minimum necessary to maintain status quo.

Naipul’s examination of African growth and its effect on all the various ethnic and economic strata of the continent suggests that the place had been losing its identity from first outside contact. For Naipul, Africa has been constantly shifting under its people’s feet, lurching forward from the slave trade to colonization to the rise of home-grown, megalomaniac leaders, until they can no longer maintain a consistent cultural identity. So, like Salim, the people of Africa are formed of dozens of different cultural and religious and ethnic bits, the sum never making a whole.

Bottom Line: A story of the identity of Africa – prose that evokes Hemingway and a story as bleak, but absent the reckless characters.

4 bones!!!! show less

Salim, an Indian man living on the East Coast of Africa, sets out to make a life at a small village at a bend in the river in the interior of Africa. He arrives there, following the old slave trails, shortly after the town has won its independence in 1963. The town is in shambles with a poor economy and hardly enough food to feed its people. Yet, Salim stays and builds a business. He is joined by a family servant named Metty and befriends a couple named Shoba and Mahesh. He also attempts to mentor a bush woman’s young son, Ferdinand. As the years roll by, the new President of this nation dumps money into building a University and “domain” where the rich white people live. In the background are always the soldiers and rumblings of show more war. Salim has a briefly passionate yet violent affair with a white married woman, and at one point is arrested for dealing in black market ivory.

V.S. Naipaul’s book A Bend in the River is perhaps one of the more depressing books I’ve read. Although the town is never named, it is most likely set in Zaire (currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo) during the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At that time there was a great deal of social and political upheaval and violence. Naipaul’s protagonist, Salim, narrates the novel and spends much of his time philosophizing about the role of women in relationships, the political and military climate of the region, his own lack of direction, and the difference between modernized people and the bush people. The problem with this internalized dialogue was that I never felt connected to any of the characters. It was as though Salim was merely telling us his tale (with very little plot).

The themes of A Bend in the River include the view of the outsider (foreigner) vs. the insider, and African rage in response to colonialism. When a mild-mannered priest who is teaching in the town (and has created a museum of bush and tribal mementos) is brutally murdered and decapitated, the townspeople barely cease their every day routines in order to pull his mangled body from the river. Naipaul uses the river and its floating heaps of water hyacinths as symbols of the relentless changes moving through Africa.

Always sailing up from the south, from beyond the bend in the river, were clumps of water hyacinths, dark floating islands on the dark river, bobbing over the rapids. It was as if rain and river were tearing away bush from the heart of the continent and floating it down to the ocean, incalculable miles away. But the water hyacinth was the fruit of the river alone. The tall lilac-coloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it “the new thing” or “the new thing in the river,” and to them it was another enemy. – from A Bend in the River, page 46 -

This was my first V. S. Naipaul novel – and I had hoped to love it. Instead I found myself growing bored with Salim’s theorizing. The book crawls at a snail’s pace. It is perhaps the longest short novel I have ever read. I also did not appreciate the negative characterization of all the women in the book. Salim (and nearly all the men in the book) frequent the brothels, and Salim at one point theorizes: But if women weren’t stupid, the world wouldn’t go round (from page 186). He later brutally attacks and beats his mistress whose response is to climb into bed and open her legs to him. The one seemingly normal relationship between Mahesh and Shoba is harshly criticized by Salim.

Mahesh was my friend. But I thought of him as a man who had been stunted by his relationship with Shoba. That had been achievement enough for him. Shoba admired him and needed him, and he was therefore content with himself, content with the person she admired. His only wish seemed to be to take care of this person. He dressed for her, preserved his looks for her. I used to think that when Mahesh considered himself physically he didn’t compare himself with other men, or judge himself according to some masculine ideal, but saw only the body that please Shoba. He saw himself as his woman saw him; and that was why, though he was my friend, I thought that his devotion to Shoba had made him half a man, and ignoble. – from A Bend in the River, page 197 -

So, I guess, according to Naipaul’s protagonist … a man cannot be a man and be devoted to the woman he loves. Huh? Maybe I should not have been surprised to read this from Wikipedia:

Naipaul credits an extramarital affair for giving A Bend in the River and his later books greater fluidity, saying these “in a way to some extent depend on her (i.e., his mistress). They stopped being dry.”

If you haven’t guessed it by now, I am not going to recommend A Bend in the River. Scholars have credited this book with being one of the books to read about Africa. I would argue that a novel which has little plot, little story, reads like a tedious monologue from a textbook, and insults women is not one too many readers want to waste their time on. My recommendation for an amazing novel set in the Congo would be The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (read my review).

Naipaul won the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 and was short listed for the Booker Prize for A Bend in the River in 1979, but he’s not getting any awards from me! show less