A Bend In The River

Ten years ago I read a biography of V.S. Naipaul, and it took his dying a year ago to get me to actually read on of his books. His novel, A Bend in the River, which was published about forty years ago, seems as good an encapsulation as to the man and the writer. In many ways it is a brilliant work, but is also reflective of the difficult man who wrote it.

The story is told by Salim, an ethnic Indian who grew up in Eastern Africa. As he puts it: "The coast was not truly African. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean. True Africa was at our back." Naipaul himself was an ethnic Indian who was born in Trinidad and spent his entire adult life in England. Salim, like Naipaul, is pretty much a man without a country, a man in the wrong place at all times.

Salim buys a general store on a bend in the river in a newly African country, which is thought to be the Congo. As such, it is a country teetering on the tipping point between the old ways and modernity, with a president who wears a leopard-skin hat and whose giant picture is everywhere. Unlike the West, true democracy is something that has eluded African nations.

Salim goes along to get along, playing by the rules. He takes no particular stance on things: "No, in this war I was neutral. I was frightened of both sides. I didn’t want to see the army on the loose. And though I felt sympathy for the people of our region, I didn’t want to see the town destroyed again. I didn’t want anybody to win; I wanted the old balance to be maintained."

He lives life quietly. He is forever encouraged to marry the daughter of the man who sold him the store, a man who has moved on to try his fortune in Uganda, Canada, and then England. He has other ethnic Indian friends who try to succeed in Africa. He befriends a white man, an Africanist who has the ear of the president, and he has an affair with the man's wife, which brings out the best and worst of Salim. Finally, the political situation will become too precarious.

As others have pointed out, Salim is a deeply flawed man. He is a coward, and there is a disturbing scene of domestic violence that he tells matter of factly--can we attribute that to the time period, Naipaul's own attitude about women, or is it just a part of Salim. Naipaul has Salim say: "Women are stupid. But if women weren’t stupid the world wouldn’t go round."

As much as we may hate Salim--at the end of the book I'm not sure if I wanted him to get away or be made to pay for his indifference (he is arrested for having ivory tusks, which isn't very endearing) I can't deny the greatness of the writing. Naipaul writes carefully--each word seems deliberately chosen, and the sentences flow effortlessly. Consider this passage: "If you look at a column of ants on the march you will see that there are some who are stragglers or have lost their way. The column has no time for them; it goes on. Sometimes the stragglers die. But even this has no effect on the column. There is a little disturbance around the corpse, which is eventually carried off—and then it appears so light. And all the time the great busyness continues, and that apparent sociability, that rite of meeting and greeting which ants travelling in opposite directions, to and from their nest, perform without fail."

A Bend In The River is about the pauses in between the great events of life, and in that way it can be a book that lulls you into a sense of false comfort. But between the lines there is terror and death. As he writes, "Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away."