A Bend In The River – V. S. Naipaul, 1979 ★★★½

Western Civilization Rules

The unique voice of V. S. Naipaul has both blessed and cursed his literary legacy. Often celebrated for his outsider view of Western civilization, he is also lambasted as a crude, sexist apologist for same.

One thing he could never be accused of being was sentimentality. His books take shots in all directions, ridiculing progress, tradition, Marxism, capitalism, religion, ethnocentrism, even multiculturalism. When considering a book that encapsulates his iconoclastic cynicism as well as A Bend In The River, it’s important up front to accept and even appreciate the author’s desire not to play nice.

That doesn’t make A Bend In The River a great novel for me; I don’t rate its story or characters that high. But it is powerful to read.

Salim is a merchant of Indian heritage who we meet in an unnamed nation located in the African interior, making a nice living off a retail establishment he purchased. The advice he got when he bought in was to not wait too long for the best price but sell and move on while he can: “You can always get into those places. What is hard is to get out.”

Salim sees the wisdom of this, especially as things in his adopted nation begin to fall apart. Yet he hangs on, registering but ignoring the signs.

Naipaul furnishes few clues as to the real-life basis for his unnamed setting. A Wikipedia entry suggest Kisangani, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known as Stanleyville when it was colonized by Belgians. Above, a Kisangani street scene.
Photograph by Piet Clement from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kisangani

Naipaul’s unsentimental view is encapsulated in its famous first sentence of the book: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” This bracing maxim is continually reiterated and validated.

The idea is best captured by an old friend, Indar, a progressive intellectual who becomes, for a time, an academic advisor for the nation’s leader, called “the Big Man.” Indar tells Salim how travels between Africa and Europe changed his backward mindset:

“And there is something else about the airplane. You can go back many times to the same place. And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn’t exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground.”

Whether Indar believes this isn’t quite clear; Naipaul clearly did.

Author V. S. Naipaul was a man of many continents. Born in Trinidad, he was of Indian heritage and educated in Great Britain before settling in Africa for a time. A celebrated novelist when A Bend In The River was published, Naipaul preferred non-fiction essays. A 2001 Nobel laureate, he died in 2018.
Portrait by Ian Berry from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/memories-of-v-s-naipaul

That hopelessness established early keeps coming back. The title of the book refers to the stretch of land on which Salim’s town lies; whether an outpost of Arab slavers, European colonists, or discontented Africans, the current rolls sluggishly past, choked with clumps of water hyacinths, “dark floating islands on the dark river” which were disgorged upstream by the endless jungle vastness.

On the docks, we are given glimpses at other forms of life; people jostling for position on steamers while monkeys tethered for sale chew on banana skins, “nibbling without relish, as though they knew that they themselves were soon to be eaten.” Capitalism and socialism are concurrently mimicked in the form of crude, cruel exploitation.

Naipaul leaves the nation and its leader unnamed. We never encounter the Big Man directly, only learning from outside reports how he raises the image of his mother, a hotel maid, into a kind of African Madonna to be venerated by the entire population, and gradually pivots from Westernized strongman to harsh socialist despot.

In emulation of Mao, he produces little books to be purchased under duress by the population, directs militant cadres to march under his banner, and festoons the capital city with his image and sayings:

There was to me an element of pathos in those maxims, portraits and statues, and this wish of a man of the bush to make himself big, and setting about it in such a crude way. I even felt a little sympathy for the man who was making such a display of himself.

Africa's post-colonial rulers have often introduced cults of personality. Perhaps the most infamous ruler, Idi Amin of Uganda fell from power the same year A Bend In The River was published. Uganda is mentioned in the novel, ironically and pathetically, as a possible place of refuge.
Image from https://face2faceafrica.com/article/ugandas-idi-amin-and-how-he-became-one-of-the-worlds-most-hated-men

Naipaul’s depiction of Africa is not sympathetic. He depicts the people as lazy, greedy, and brutish, leaving unclear how much of this hard character is the residue of colonialism versus some deeper defect.

The Europeans themselves are mostly long gone, only their ruins remain. In their place for a time is something called “The New Domain,” a center of culture and business which draws people mostly for a fast-food restaurant that charges exorbitant prices. Meanwhile tractors rust in fallow fields while the many homeless shelter where they can:

Some papers spoke of the end of feudalism and the dawn of a new age. But what had happened was not new. People who had grown feeble had been physically destroyed. That, in Africa, was not new; it was the oldest law in the land.

The only fairly admirable character, an independent, small-time retailer Zabeth, keeps herself removed from most of the population as if fearing some infection.

Zabeth’s son, Ferdinand, is also interesting, less as a person than a compelling symbol of lost humanity. When he comes into the story, put under Salim’s care by Zabeth in hopes of gaining an education and a future, he is soon torn between frail loyalty to Salim and an impulse to exploit Salim’s shaky status as a recognized foreigner in Africa.

Mahatma Gandhi in London. Indar relates his experiences visiting London and seeing Gandhi's image on display. "We have nothing," he says. "We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves."
Image from https://romanroadlondon.com/mahatma-gandhi-kingsley-hall-bromley-by-bow-visit/

Readers complain about Naipaul’s cynicism and his scathing treatment of non-Westerners. The issue, though, is there are no heroes. A fellow outsider named Mahesh spells this out: “I don’t think you understand, Salim. And it isn’t an easy thing to understand. It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.”

As a novel, A Bend In The River is a harrowing, eloquent fugue, its descriptions both haunting and elliptical:

But at night, if you were on the river, it was another thing. You felt the land taking you back to something that was familiar, something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there. You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always.

Where A Bend In The River falls short is its story. There is much talking in this book, and not a lot of action. Indar introduces Salim to Raymond, a European academic and promoter of the Big Man’s vision, and Raymond’s much younger wife Yvette.

Salim’s sexual life has been limited to prostitutes. Yvette excites him:

My experience of women outside my family was special, limited. I had had no experience of dealing with a woman like this, no experience of language like this, no experience of a woman with such irritations and convictions. And in what she had just said I saw an honesty, a daringness which, to a man of my background, was slightly frightening and, for that reason, bewitching.

Yvette is bored with her husband, having watched him fall from the Big Man’s favor. She takes up an affair with Salim more from caprice than affection. This echoes the central theme of mutual exploitation and abandonment and ends so badly I never cared about Salim again. He’s not a protagonist with whom one can sympathize.

A river in Africa. Salim observes: "When you made a noise – dipped a paddle in the water – you heard yourself as though you were another person. The river and the forest were like presences, and much more powerful than you."
Image from https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-biggest-rivers-in-Africa-Why-are-they-important 

Whether Yvette exposes Naipaul’s reputed misogyny is open to interpretation. Like the often-callow Ferdinand, she does display positive traits, such as a clarity of vision which is rare in this novel’s cast of losers. If she seems too resigned to her sad fate, she is not alone.

The book begins brilliantly, with Naipaul front-loading all his main concepts and themes and introducing Salim in his comfortable if marginalized existence. He occupies a pleasant house once occupied by an unmarried Belgian woman who decorated it in “a slapdash modern style.” With him is Metty, a family servant who warns of growing rebel activity in the area and helps Salim hide his valuables.

A kind of savagery born of fatalism seems to drive the conflict:

The Africans had called up this war; they would suffer dreadfully, more than anybody else; but they could cope. Even the ruggedest of them had their villages and tribes, things that were absolutely theirs. They could run away again to their secret worlds and become lost in those worlds, as they had done before. And even if terrible things happened to them they would die with the comfort of knowing that their ancestors were gazing down approvingly at them.

Zaire soldiers at war. In A Bend In The River, war is a constant backdrop, though always just offstage. Salim describes the sound of one distant battle as "oddly comforting, like the sound of rain in the night."
Image from https://vocalafrica.com/civil-wars-in-africa/

Meanwhile, Salim lunches with Mahesh and his wife Shoba, fellow Indians who like him live in luxury and fear. She has family back home who threatened to throw acid on her for eloping. Salim also visits with Father Huismans, a Belgian priest who gathers masks and other cultural artifacts for safekeeping, often journeying deep into the jungle to do so.

A slow buildup of tension gives A Bend In The River much of its power; eventually it all does come to a boil but dissipates, too. The final fate of the nation and most of the characters are left unresolved, which is frustrating. Again, I didn’t care that much about them, but I wanted to know more about the results of their journeys than Naipaul gave. Alas, we conclude with another image of the river rolling on.

A Bend In The River is a fine novel, absorbing and complex. Naipaul wrote for a Western audience, and his dark take on the folly of progress is designed not to reassure but make readers uneasy. The fact he succeeds so well may be why many people find reasons not to like him. The story is bitter, yes, but also a true reflection of life as he found it.