A Bend In The River

from PilgrimJess

"Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned, but fiction never lies." Set in an unnamed country which has recently won independence from colonial rule, this novel centres around Salim, a Indian Muslim whose family had settled in an Africa coastal town where they were traders. Salim is impres...

from tortoisebook

Having finished this book I am now going over it in my mind, bringing it all together and trying to work out what I make of it. To begin with, it is beautifully written and describes Africa and its characters so wonderfully that I cared about them and wanted to know how life panned out for them. ...

from amerynth

I found V.S. Naipaul's "A Bend in the River" to be a hard book to rate. The novel really excelled in giving a sense of place in a particular time period, though I didn't care for the way characters were portrayed or the rather bleak view that Naipul appears to take of Africans in general. Set in ...

from Socrmom78

"People lived as they had always done; there was no break between past and present. All that had happened in the past was washed away; there was always only the present. It was as though, as a result of some disturbance in the heavens, the early morning light was always receding into the darkness...

from nandadevi

It seems to me that this is more of a reflection than a novel. Perhaps Naipaul deliberately forgoes any sense of construction in order to convey the feeling of people, ideas and aspirations being swept away by the river that seems (in his story) to arise somewhere near Conrad´s Heart of Darkness....