A Bend in the River by V S Naipaul

A Bend in the River by V S Naipaul

Post-colonial Africa is dissected with pitiless lucidity in this disturbing novel about an outsider, the young Indian trader, Salim, who has moved from the coastal settlement where he grew up to an unnamed country in the African interior (largely based on the Democratic Republic of Congo), settling on that very bend in the river where Conrad had set his Heart of Darkness some seventy years before. Salim enters a ghost town, once a flourishing European outpost, which is fast returning to the bush. A new dictator 'the Big Man' is about to impose his regime with the assistance of Raymond, 'The Big Man's White Man', whose humanitarian concerns have won him international acclaim, but whose plans for the country's future are arrogant and delusional. Salim becomes obsessed by Raymond's wife, Yvette, and begins and affair with her. Personal and political tragedy follow, civil war returns, and Salim, contemplating the disastrous course of his life since leaving home, speaks for the powerlessness of ordinary people everywhere in the face of historical upheaval: 'I couldn't protect anyone [and] no one could protect me... we could only in various ways hide from the truth... One tide of history has brought us here ... Another tide of history was coming to wash us away.'.

Brilliant and terrifying * Observer *
Naipaul has fashioned a work of intense imaginative forceIt 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

Novelist and travel writer V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He studied at Oxford University, after graduation moving to London to work for the BBC. His novels include A House for Mr Biswas (also in Everyman's Library), The Enigma of Arrival and In a Free State, which won the Booker Prize. His works of non-fiction include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief and The Masque of Africa. In 1990 Naipaul received a knighthood and in 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 2018.

SKU	Non disponible
ISBN 13	9781841593913
ISBN 10	1841593915
Titre	A Bend in the River
Auteur	V S Naipaul
Série	Everyman's Library Classics
État	Non disponible
Type de reliure	Hardback
Éditeur	Everyman
Année de publication	2019-09-12
Nombre de pages	312
Note de couverture	La photo du livre est présentée à titre d'illustration uniquement. La reliure, la couverture ou l'édition réelle peuvent varier.
Note	Non disponible