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336 pages, Paperback
First published September 20, 1979
I knew things about the forest kingdom. I knew that the former slave people were in revolt & were being butchered back into submission. But Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder and the muddy rivers & lakes washed the blood away.
the region had gone mad with anger & fear--all the accumulated anger of the colonial period, aimed at Europeans & also at Arabs, with every kind of tribal fear reawakened. The local people hated the intruders who had ruled it and they had preferred to destroy the town rather than take it over. Having destroyed the town, they grieved for it. The less educated we were, the more at peace we were.Thus, statues & monuments with Latin & French inscriptions had been desecrated. Among those left behind, there is a quality of learning to survive, of just "carrying on", that seems pervasive. The president has taken it upon himself to restore such towns, even employing an intellectual European, "the Big Man's white man" & other consultants to add vigor to the restoration process. And throughout it all, the steamship continues to travel up & down the river to the nation's capital, a linkage that seems important to all. There is a vivid description of hyacinths floating down the river, serving as a kind of connective tissue.
Nothing stands still. Everything changes. I will inherit no house & no house I build will now pass to my children. That way of life was gone. I have only been waiting & I will wait for the rest of my life. The flat I live in had been the Belgian lady's but now it has changed again. I felt all the child's heartache at being in a strange place. I was homesick but home was hardly a place I could return to. Home was just something in my head, something I had lost. And in that way, I was like the ragged Africans who were so abject in the town we serviced.One adaptable Asian character named Nazruddin manages to flee to Uganda & when things disintegrate there, to Canada and then after a business venture fails, eventually attempts to seek refuge in England. In time, a People's Liberation Force ravages the town & those trapped within it, Africans included. This group pledges war against "all capitalists, imperialists, multinationals & puppet-powers that act as false gods." A general disintegration of authority occurs.
Those faces of Africa! Those masks of child-like calm that had brought down the blows of the world, and of the Africans as well, now in jail. I felt that I had never seen them so clearly before. Those faces were not vacant or passive or resigned. There was with the prisoners as with their active tormentors, a frenzy.The bend-in-the-river town that once had as its optimistic Latin motto, taken from The Aeneid: Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi, or "he approves of the mingling of the peoples & their bonds of union" was now in free-fall, full of nervous, unhappy people, all attempting to stay out of harm's way, particularly as the president, who is fond of staging executions to test the loyalty of his people, is due to pay a visit to the town, causing further stifling fear & abundant chaos. Naipaul alludes to something similar afflicting the market stalls:
But the frenzy had taken them far beyond their cause or even knowledge of their cause, far beyond thought. They had prepared themselves for death not because they were martyrs; but because they were & what they knew they were was all they had. I never felt closer to them, or more far away.
Basins of grubs & caterpillars; baskets of trussed-up hens, squawking when they were lifted up by one wing by the vendor or a prospective buyer; dull-eyed goats on the bare scuffed ground, chewing at rubbish & even paper; damp-haired young monkeys, full of misery, tethered tightly around their narrow waists & nibbling at peanuts & banana skin & mango skin but nibbling without relish, as though they knew that they themselves were soon to be eaten.I found the evocations of village life & the shifting relationships among the various well-drawn characters in post-colonial Africa colorfully rendered, exceedingly well cast. Bend in the River is a novel I've just reread, having first read it just after it was published, with Naipaul fully in charge of his ample literary gift.
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”