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V. S. Naipaul

A Bend in the River Paperback – International Edition, March 13, 1989

by V. S. Naipaul (Author)

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A "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) from the Nobel Prize-winning author that takes us deeply into the life of one man—an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation.

Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

March 13, 1989
Dimensions

5.22 x 0.59 x 7.98 inches
ISBN-10

0679722025
ISBN-13

978-0679722021
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"For sheer abundance of talent, there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V.S. Naipaul." —The New York Times Book Review

"A brilliant novel." —The New York Times

"Confirms Naipaul's position as one of the best writers now at work." —Newsweek

"The sweep of Naipaul's imagination, the brilliant fictional frame that expresses it, are in my view without equal today." —Elizabeth Hardwick

From the Inside Flap

In the "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man?an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

From the Back Cover

In the "brilliant novel" ("The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man--an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

About the Author

V.S. NAIPAUL was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession.

His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.

In 1990, V.S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lived with his wife Nadira and cat Augustus in Wiltshire, and died in 2018.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

from the Introduction by Patrick Marnham

V. S. Naipaul lived in Africa for just nine months. He subsequently set three of his novels in fictional African countries and his last book was the account of a journey in search of African belief.

In 1950, at the age of 18, he had left his home in Trinidad to read English at University College, Oxford, and he did not return home for six years. He never lived in Trinidad again. After university he was offered a job, with the BBC Colonial Service and it was then that his first novel The Mystic Masseur was published. In 1961 he won an international reputation with what he called his “breakthrough book”, A House for Mr Biswas, a comic tour de force set in Port of Spain where he had grown up. After that he abandoned the Caribbean background, finding it too narrow, and most of his subsequent writing was inspired by his journeys in Latin America, India and Africa, in search of what he called “the great world”. His connection with Africa had come by chance - part of his “luck” as he termed it. In 1966 he had been offered a position as writer in residence at Makerere University in Uganda, then one of the leading universities on the African continent.

Uganda four years after independence still had a bright future. It was regarded as a ‘developing society’, but it had preserved a superficially coherent ruling structure. In many African countries the move from colony to sovereign state, often accompanied by insurrection and bloodshed, had been too rapid.   The continent was in a state of chaotic transition. Whereas some countries such as Senegal and the Ivory Coast were peaceful and reasonably prosperous, others were already on the point of collapse. Naipaul arrived in Kampala at a critical moment. Within weeks the prime minister of Uganda, Milton Obote, staged a coup and declared himself to be the executive president. In the fighting that followed over a thousand people were killed. Makerere continued to function but Naipaul was appalled by what he described as the international community’s “castrated reaction” to the violence. Obote - who had been educated by Protestant missionaries and was a university graduate – was regarded by the political scientists and international analysts as a potentially progressive influence. Naipaul immediately saw him for what he was, a brutal despot, and was angered by the African experts’ ready endorsement of the new regime.

Towards the end of his year at Makerere, on a trip through Rwanda to the Congo border, Naipaul had a glimpse of the devastation left by the long-fought conflicts that had followed Congolese Independence in 1960. In an uprising known as the “Simba rebellion”, in August 1964, a rebel army had appeared out of the forest and occupied about one-third of the Congo taking the regional capital of Stanleyville. 2500 government supporters had been massacred in the town centre and over 2000 European residents were held hostage. The ‘Simba’ warriors were often armed with little more than magic amulets and drugs, but they believed themselves invincible. In the bush white people were hunted down and systematically killed. Nuns were raped and murdered, missionaries were tortured and chopped to pieces. It took an international force of mercenaries armed with jet fighter and bombers and Belgian paratroopers to free the hostages, many of whom died. The ‘Simbas’, still believing in their magic, melted away into the forest, sometimes taking refuge in either Rwanda or Uganda. The horror was still fresh in people’s minds when Naipaul set off on his tour.

One day he came across a place called Gisenyi, on the shores of Lake Kivu. This had been a holiday resort for prosperous Europeans. But in the tribal fighting that followed Rwandan independence this place too had been destroyed. The entire town had collapsed and was returning to bush. Naipaul noticed that despite this it was still inhabited. People were crouched in the shadows “trying to recreate the hut life” within the wreckage of modern bungalows. For Naipaul “all writing has an element of discovery and the unexpected”. When he left Uganda the “unexpected” detail that continued to disturb him was the sight of those people living in huts inside the bungalows. It had never occurred to him that such a thing could happen. The shock remained and the scene would emerge from his memory 13 years later and become part of the inspiration for what many believe is his greatest work. A Bend in the River was written in a very specific political context, but it was not the first novel he set in Africa.

**

In January 1971 President Obote, who had by then created a secret police force - which he called the ‘Public Safety Unit’ - and had used torture and murder to support his dictatorship, was overthrown by one of his army officers, an uneducated part-time gold smuggler named Idi Amin. Later that year Naipaul published In A Free State, which describes the flight of two Europeans through a central African country in a state of insurrection. It was his first fictional excursion into the realities of Africa’s growing post-colonial crisis.

The novel won the Booker Prize but not universal approval. Some liberal or left-wing readers regarded Naipaul’s depiction of Africa as reactionary and ‘racist’. Another writer might have been disturbed by the allegation. Naipaul remained unperturbed. He had not engaged in this high calling in order to recycle familiar cant. In his own words he was not interested in “telling his readers what they already knew”. In any event the criticisms soon lost their sting. One year after the book was published Idi Amin expelled thousands of Uganda’s Asian citizens and expropriated their property. His rule was proving to be even more brutal, and far more racist, than Obote’s. He had created a second murder squad, the ‘Bureau of State Research’. As Amin’s reign of terror developed the British government - which may have been involved in planning the coup that brought him to power – continued, together with France and Israel, to offer him aid and military support. For observers of Uganda, In a Free State had acquired the additional value of reportage. The overwhelming atmosphere of menace had been accurately evoked by Naipaul a year earlier.

Three years later, visiting Kampala in 1974, I saw how that same fear had come to dominate people’s lives. By this time Amin had dismissed the British and the Israelis and replaced them with Colonel Gadhafi and the PLO. The East German mission, led by Gottfried Lessing, first husband of Doris Lessing, had become responsible for the Bureau of State Affairs. And Amin had become more unpredictable than ever. My first call was on the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was furious that I had been admitted to the country. Who had let me in? He was not soothed when he discovered that the English official who had authorised my journey had already been deported. He had been forced to board the plane I had arrived on.

The Permanent Secretary was having a bad time. He was a highly educated civil servant who was being publicly humiliated by the new Minister, a semi-literate army sergeant from the same region as President Amin. But when I eventually met the Minister, I realised that he was just as frightened as his Permanent Secretary. While I was sitting in his office he telephoned to Amin and when the call was put through he held the receiver in the tips of his fingers as though it was made of ice. His eyes widened while he listened, and when he spoke it was very quietly indeed. The words he used most often were “Yes, Effendi. Yes Effendi”. * [*Fn. ‘Effendi’ - equivalent to Sergeant-Major in a colonial regiment]. And the fear was just as great among the expatriates. When I visited a Scottish professor of surgery in his comfortable villa in Kampala he checked the door and the window for eavesdroppers and told me that we had to speak quietly because he thought his houseboy might be a police spy.

**

A Bend in the River, published in 1979, presents a terrifying vision of life as it is lived in dark corners of the world, beyond the soporific blanket of western affluence. It is set in an imaginary country that strongly resembles the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the days of President Mobutu. In 1975 Naipaul had returned to Africa and travelled for three months through the land he had glimpsed on that short trip to the ruined towns of Rwanda. The Belgians had proposed a national identity for the people of the forest. Then, quite suddenly, they had left the Congo, and the embryo state they had abandoned, a complex instrument that nobody had been trained to operate, became an empty husk.   The new orthodoxy of “Mobutuism”, or “authenticité” offered a way forward, a new security. Naipaul was unimpressed. The long essay he wrote after his visit, ‘A New King for the Congo’ opened with the words, “The Congo which used to be a Belgian colony, is now an African kingdom and is called Zaire. It appears to be a nonsense name….”   In it he described Kisangani, formerly Stanleyville, with its decayed hotels and rusting iron barges. Stanleyville was the colonial town that had grown up on the site of Kurtz’s imaginary stockade in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This is the town which stands today in the centre of Africa on a huge bend in the Congo River and which is the original setting for both novels. In neither book is the country named. In Naipaul’s we are just given “the coast”, “the mountains”, “the forest”, and “the town in the interior at the bend in the great river”.

The story is woven in an intricate pattern that unfolds into three separate narratives. One is that of a colonised country that has been abandoned and is in a state of crisis. The history and politics of the town provide the framework for the lives of Naipaul’s characters but never descend into a polemic. The second narrative describes the daily lives of the town’s inhabitants, men and women enclosed within the heart of a country in crisis. The third deals specifically with the struggle of one character, the narrator Salim, to make sense of his unexpected predicament as a once bright future is destroyed by the surrounding chaos. He is re-living the nightmare of In a Free State but now organised on a much wider canvas divided into four parts.

In Part One, ‘The Second Rebellion’, the political instability that has spread up river from the capital is ended when the President employs white mercenaries to quell a rebellion. A measure of prosperity then returns to the town and Salim is able to reorganise his business. In the second part, ‘The New Domain’, he is invited to meet some of the town’s recently installed elite who are living in a purpose-built university quarter. In the third part, ‘The Big Man’, the policy of authenticité imposed by the President begins to unravel, and his followers realise that this has been built on lies. The concluding part is entitled simply ‘Battle”.

The opening pages describe Salim’s journey from the coast to the town, and his arrival, when he discovers that the place he was expecting to settle in has “ceased to exist”. Salim has been tricked. The friend who persuaded him to leave his own community on the East African coast and buy the dormant trading post set up on the river had failed to mention the town’s advanced state of decay. On his journey from the coast, as he gets closer to his destination Salim has a premonition of what awaits him. The road leading deeper into the forest passes through a disturbed region, between places “full of blood”. Salim thinks, ‘But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can’t be a new life at the end of this”. He can always buy his way in through successive frontier posts, but he has a strong sense that it will be more difficult to buy his way out.

Salim enters a town that has gone back to bush. Many of the houses have been stripped and then set alight, their European owners having long since fled. The swimming pools have been drained and only the rain water keeps their slime green. In the scrub surrounding the ruined buildings he can make out the concrete shells of what had once been restaurants and night clubs. It is a ghost town and Salim, wandering through it, feels like a ghost “not from the past but from the future”.   His warehouse is standing but it is empty.

The town has a history, which is essentially the real history of Kisangani. Arab rulers in search of gold and slaves had come to that region for centuries before the Europeans. The bend in the river had been the meeting point between two competing forms of exploitation. The Arabs had come from the east, the Europeans from the Atlantic. Then the “Arabian energy that had pushed them into Africa had died down at its source, and their power was like the light of a star that travels on after the star itself has become dead…; at the bend in the river there had grown up a European, and not an Arab, town”.

It is this outpost of European civilisation that has in turn disappeared. Looking around at the desolation Salim ponders, “This piece of earth – how many changes had come to it! Forest at a bend in the river, a meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilization… and now this.” “This” is the next phase in the town’s history - a system based on lies. The town, with the rest of the country, is being misgoverned again, this time by the new ruler, the ‘Big Man’, who unable to continue the colonial project, and unable to return to the pre-colonial society, has decided to pretend that there is a third way, which he dubs “authenticité”. Salim arrives before the new regime has been imposed. He watches it grow in strength and then fall to pieces, “until the lies (the Big Man) started making us all live made the people confused and frightened and, when a fetish stronger than his was found, made them decide to put an end to it all and go back again to the beginning”. . . .

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reissue edition (March 13, 1989)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679722025
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679722021
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.22 x 0.59 x 7.98 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #277,670 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Fear or Shame—There Seemed to be Nothing In Between

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 23, 2017

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Salim was born and raised on the east coast of Africa. His family, originally from northwestern India, was one of many Southern Asians who traded with Africans and lived amongst the coast for centuries, secured African slaves, and like the Arabs before them, had children with their female servants. However, after East Africa gained their independence in the early 1960s, the slaves became servants, but were also part of the family, therefore, refused to leave.

Salim’s family could not afford to send him to university in England. He had tired of the crowded conditions in the home with the blended families, pessimistic about the future, and the volatility that was inevitable with his country’s independence from Britain.

A wealthy family friend, Nazruddin, sold Salim a store located deep into the interior of Africa for a minimal amount. In addition, Salim promised to marry Nazruddin’s eldest daughter, Kareisha.

Tired of his family’s old-fashioned arrangement of marriages, Salim bolted before the banns of matrimony were settled, before meeting Kareisha, but knew Nazruddin believed him loyal and that he’d keep his vow.

After a long and tiring journey to the interior country, near a bend in the river, Salim discovered his store had lay derelict for some time. The country had gained their independence, but the entire town was in disarray. Villagers had suffered so much from the intruders—Europeans, Arabs, and other Africans. The people had destroyed everything reminding them of the abuse and their enslavement during colonial time.

Salim became familiar with the ex-patriates and other Southern Asians living in the town, and Ali, a servant in Salim’s family arrived. Ali would later be known as Metty (Métis) with the locals. He learned the patois and became Salim’s Custom’s Clerk. Salim treated him like a family member.

Salim quickly became recognized and respected by other traders with goods to be bought and sold. One of the traders, was Zabeth, an astute business woman and known conjurer, who Salim admired. Zabeth arrived once a month with her entourage to make purchases for her fishing village. A year or more later, after Zabeth developed rapport and trust with Salim, she asked that he watch over her fifteen year-old son, Ferdinand, who would attend a nearby lycée.

Salim’s insecurities flared whenever someone had success and prestige: He became preoccupied with Ferdinand, Zabeth’s teenage son, who exuded strength of character; a young man, calm, confident and in control of his feelings, whom Salim discerned would someday become a man of great power and change in Africa. This made Salim feel inferior, worthless, and eventually resentful. Yet one day, Ferdinand would become his savior; and Indar, a former wealthy neighborhood friend of Salim’s, from East Africa, who studied in the UK. Indar made Salim feel ‘backwards.’ Indar had seen the world, Salim had not. Yet Indar had his own unhappiness with life in the UK and in the States. When he reunited with Salim in the interior, he had come to town as a guest of the ‘Big Man.’

Through Indar, Salim met Yvette, a Belgian, married to an Englishman, the ‘Big Man’s’ historian and speech writer. Indar had had an affair with Yvette before leaving Africa. Salim became her lover afterwards. Salim had used prostitutes until he met Yvette; a new stimulation. He was enthralled with her. Then an obsession sprouted with her that led to him physically abusing her when he found she and her husband were leaving the country.

Later, Salim visited Nazruddin in England, after an absence of about eight years. Nazruddin had bought several homes in England. Again, the feelings of inadequacy returned to Salim; he thought his life would always be unsatisfactory. Yet, he met Nazruddin’s eldest daughter, Kareisha, now a pharmacist, whom appeared amiable.

Before Salim flew home to Africa, at a stopover in Belgium. He slept with a prostitute.

On his return, he discovered changes had been made, which would eventually include betrayal by Metty. The ‘Big Man’ had instituted a takeover; all businesses would now be owned by its African citizens. In addition, he distrusted the educated.

According to Metty and circulating rumors, Africa would revert back to its old ways before colonialism. Blood would be shed.

Salim knew there was no going back to his home on the East Coast of Africa. Changes had been made there too.

In symbolism, the bend in the river, I think, is used as a sign of changes, boundaries and contrast between civilization (the townspeople) and those outside (the villagers.). In addition, water is constantly moving and flowing, and the world mutable.

I gave this book four stars. I thought the chapter on Indar was too long and of no interest to me. Yet Salim is interesting because it involves the many changes and dispositions in his life: his courage to leave home in his early twenties and initiate a successful business, and the negative changes such as his disregard for intimacy and warmth, and instead seeking prostitutes, his insecurities, his one obsession, which was not love, but lust, and his not seeming to have a plan to change his life and become more successful. Salim was like the water hyacinths, beautiful, but fixed, and difficult to move or change.

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“The Ancestors Shriek”

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 14, 2018

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A Bend in the River (1979) is Nobel laureate winner (2001) V. S. Naipaul’s now classic novel of Africa set following the end of British colonialism. At the heart of his novel is an Indian shopkeeper given only the name of Salim who arrives in an unnamed town in Africa far from the west coast. Wanting to “break away” from his “family and community” and an “unspoken commitment” to marry a young woman, Salim hopes to “make a fresh start” by being a part of a new Africa, one which he and others hope will become a new and prospering community. As such, he is willing to live “a stripped, Robinson Crusoe kind of existence” in “the ruined suburb near the rapids” at the bend of a great river (also unnamed). The aftermath of the rebellion that drives out the Europeans makes “for an odd feeling: to be among the ruins was to have your time-sense unsettled. You felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had already been lived out for you and you were looking at the relics of that life. You were in a place where the future had come and gone.”

It is through Salim’s eyes and experiences—an outsider—that readers are given a vivid and realistic description of a nation’s hopes and challenges during a period of immense and new change. It is a portrait of Africa that rivals many of the works of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Heart of Darkness (1899), being the most obvious, which was set during the Colonial period of “the dark Continent.”

Among the strengths Naipaul brings to A Bend in the River are the numerous, distinctive character studies he giftedly creates. Among the major characters other than Salim himself, there are Shoba and Mahesh, “an extraordinarily good-looking couple” also trying to set up a shop and enterprise with whom Salim befriends. Another fascinating and most notably different couple are Yvette and Raymond. Raymond zealously respects and works hard for the new president awaiting a reward that is always promised but seemingly without realization while Yvette feels restless and “encumbered” in an equally unfulfilling relationship. Metty, with “exotic… African connections” because he comes from a group of “house slaves,” becomes useful to Salim as both an assistant in Salim’s shop and flat, but who also lessens Salim’s “solitude” and makes “the empty months more bearable” as Salim tries to raise a business from the “wreckage.” Zabeth is a strong-willed, old, and fearsome woman who lives in the bush country; a merchant and an alleged “magician or sorceress” who travels alone through rugged terrain for days to get to Salim’s shop and back home with goods to sell to her local people. She also introduces to Salim to her son, Ferdinand, a naïve stranger outside of his remote home who Zabeth insists attend the lycée and be watched over by Salim. The school is run by Father Huismans, a Belgian priest, who collects African artifacts to preserve the nation’s past which he fears is “dying or about to die.” To him, “Africa was a wonderful place, full of new things.”

For Salim, there is little pleasure and even less rest in Africa. His personal joys are reduced to occasional beers and food, conversations with a few friends, brothel women for whose company he pays, and eventually an ill-fated affair. (It is in the depiction of Salim’s affair that readers are likely to perceive what many would view as misogyny, today.) It is through Salim’s keen senses that he watches, helplessly, as the promise of a new Africa begins to erode due to the new regime and a president who defines success much as did the Europeans but without their intellect and vision. Salim’s conclusion: “…the war, which we had thought dead, was all at once around us.”

Naipaul’s writing is without sensation and sentiment although filled with telling detail. He places the reader firmly and completely into Salim’s hands as readers feel and experience people moving “rapidly from depression to optimism and back down again;” the same fate of Africa’s hopes and dreams. As such, Africa, itself, is the biggest and most important character portrayed in A Bend in the River.

Those already familiar with the immediate post-colonial history of Africa read A Bend in the River with a certain degree of sadness, aware of how things must end for those inhabitants (and especially outsiders) without power under whichever regime is in power. The race, the backgrounds, the faces, the religion, the language, and the origins of the masters and the slaves may change over time, but equal distribution of wealth and freedom remains elusive (even to this day). Ironically, this and the floating water hyacinths (to which Naipaul frequently calls attention) following the currents of the big river are the one constant in Africa in this amazingly well written, insightful, and captivating novel.

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Martin Jones

Lost in the Middle

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 30, 2018

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A Bend in the River starts in the childhood of Salim, our narrator. He is an African of Indian origin, living on Africa’s east coast - except this part of the continent can’t really be described as Africa:

“AFRICA WAS MY HOME, had been the home of my family for centuries. But we came from the east coast, and that made the difference. 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.”

When civil unrest threatens, Salim heads into the interior to take up a business opportunity offered by a family friend. This is a shop selling bits of everything in a town beside a river in an unnamed central African country. Salim’s town is at the heart of both country and continent, but - in an irony characteristic of the book - seems very much a marginalised place. Despite the town’s central location, in terms of the river it lies right at the end of navigation, as far up stream as a boat can reach. The east coast might be not truly African, but Salim’s town in the middle is not truly African either. It’s a peripheral place, with a turbulent population riven by all kinds of allegiances. This situation is reflected in the real world. Think of the great cities of America, for example, and you’ll see that the top two - New York, Los Angeles - are ports on the coast, where there is the greatest interchange with other places. America’s geographical centre is in rural Kansas, close to the town of Lebanon, with a population of just over 200.

Pondering on the book after I’d finished it, I thought about a line in a Lindisfarne song about another town by a river:

“The fog on the Tyne is all mine.”

There’s a passage in A Bend in the River involving river mist.

“In the darkness of river and forest you could be sure only of what you could see –and even on a moonlight night you couldn’t see much. 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. You felt unprotected, an intruder. In the daylight –though the colours could be very pale and ghostly, with the heat mist at times suggesting a colder climate –you could imagine the town being rebuilt and spreading.”

The town is little more than a fleeting daydream. People think they own the fog, but the fog belongs to no one - or it belongs to everyone if you wish to look at things from a warmer perspective. Admittedly, a warmer perspective is not very evident in A Bend in the River.

Perhaps a warmer perspective comes from the sense that finishing the book, people might not be so quick to differentiate insiders from outsiders, people who belong from those who don’t. With the centre in the same place as the periphery, with home presented as such a nebulous concept, we might ironically become more welcoming and tolerant.

12 people found this helpful

RYAN FIENNES

Greatest Editions

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 5, 2021

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The Everyman's Library Classics Edition books are, in my opinion, the best quality books available in the price-range.
They are quality bound, with acid-free paper, dust jacket, and ribbon page marker.
There are also a great range of authors available in this collection, and they are very reasonably priced.

2 people found this helpful

A. Rose

So Slow

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 13, 2018

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I've had a good crack at this one but unfortunately, at 47%, I've given up on it. It's far too wordy, so many words but I can hardly relay what the story is about. It's well written enough (well constructed sentences and comas in the right place) but totally lacking storyline. The characters are not particularly likeable and to say that six years had passed from the beginning to where I gave up, Salim has led the most boring life ever.

I read this as part of a reading group and it was generally not liked by any.

I agree with the agent mentioned in the preface!

2 people found this helpful

Kindle Customer

Missing the maestro

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 22, 2018

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Naipaul died last week and his work was highly lauded thought I ought to read something of his. This title appealed but I noticed later that it was not included in The Times guide to Naipaul for beginners. Strange rather dull story that suddenly stops. Good characterisation but not particularly good characters. Maybe it's not one of his best, but I won't rush to read another.

One person found this helpful

Gerard Browne

Brilliant but unsympathetic characters

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 9, 2020

Verified Purchase

I loved the literary talent here but didn't really like any of the characters. I hesitate to comment on the opinions of those who have lived through this history but there is a bit of the Irish expat hating Ireland in it. Also, the casual violence towards women and contempt for the slaves is disconcerting, having said which the language is gorgeous. It's that classic does the artist have to be admirable to make great art quandary.

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Buy new:

$8.97

$3.99 delivery: Thursday, June 1

Ships from: Ethans Book Barn

Sold by: Ethans Book Barn

Buy used:

$7.65