Book description
'Brilliant and terrifying' Observer I had to be the man who was doing
well and more than well, the man whose drab shop concealed some bigger
operation that made millions. I had to be the man who had planned it
all, who had come to the destroyed town at the bend in the river because
he had foreseen the rich future. 'Salim, the narrator, is a young man
from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast of Centeral
Africa. Salim has left the coast to make his way in the interior, there
to take on a small trading shop of this and that, sudries, sold to the
natives. The place is "a bend in the river"; it is Africa. The
time is post-colonial, the time of Independence. The Europeans have
withdrawn or been forced to withdraw and the scene is one of chaos,
violent change, warring tribes, ignorance, isolation, poverty and a lack
of prepartion for the modern world they have entered, or partially
assumed as a sort of decoration. It is a story of historical upheaval
and social breakdown. Naipaul has fashioned a work of intense
imaginative force. It is a haunting creation, rich with incident and
human bafflement, played out in an immense detail of landscape rendered
with a poignant brilliance.' Elizabeth Hardwick 'Always a master of
fictional landscape, Naipaul here shows, in his variety of human
examples and in his search for underlying social causes, a Tolstoyan
spirit' John Updike
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went
to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University
College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no
other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction
and non-fiction, including
Half a Life,
A House for Mr Biswas,
A Bend in the River, The Magic Seeds
and a collection of letters,
Between Father and Son. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature.
