A Bend in the River - VS Naipaul

 I finished reading VS Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. I had known the book for a long time and had expected it to be very different from how I found it. The opening line of the book eulogizes the importance of success in life – “The world is what it is; people who don’t make it have no place in it,” which is also the title of VSN’s biography  – and I thought it would be the story of someone’s rise against odds, but the book is about other things. It’s about identity, history, worldview, imperialism, the bequest of the white man and the struggle of the black man to find his own identity and pride based on his own culture and history and his opposition to the white man even as he looks upto him, copies his ways to raise himself in the estimate of his own people and find his approval. Naipaul has chosen Africa as his setting to explore these themes.

Salim comes from a decently off family that has stayed in Africa for a few generations now. His doesn’t have great professional opportunities in the place and takes up a shop dealing in this and that and located in a town in Africa, that’s situated at the bend of a river. White rulers have just withdrawn from the town and tribals have come to power. Initially there is some quite and Salim’s shop flourishes but the tranquil is broken by a coup which brings an African chieftain – President – to power.  

Through the President, Naipaul shows insecurities of a tyrant who wants to use his African background to his political advantage and at the same time shows off his white connections to heighten himself in the estimate of his people.  Naipaul uses this small town, its people and their antagonism toward the white man to show how while they are opposed to the white man ruling them and want to erase all his vestiges, they don’t know how to rule themselves and left to themselves they can only bring chaos and killing. I was thinking that this has become an obsolete pro-empire view today, but then Afghanistan came to mind.

Salim goes to England briefly and returns to the town to find that the President has nationalized all private properties, and his shop is one of them. The shop has been put under a trust and an African, who Salim knew, has been entrusted to oversee it. Salim works as a manager in the shop for a while before is he arrested by police one day because the President is to visit the town and once released, Salim leaves the place for good together with may other ‘outsiders’.

The book is disturbing in many ways in that it forces you to visit things about you and your country which you don’t want to and Naipaul has an acerbic and mocking way of putting things. But what’s surprising about it is although written almost 30 years ago, it reflects the global realities of today and reminds you that themes like empire and identity never become dated.

Salim the protagonist thinks to himself that colonizers need to make statues to themselves because their needs are complex: they need to glorify their rule to the posterity by making statues and also enjoy the material benefits of their rule when it lasts. But simple people from simple civilizations don’t have such multi-tiered necessities.  

The book can be slow sometimes but finally rewards you for holding on till the end.

Masque of Africa - A difficult Act to Pull Off

Have you heard of a travelogue about old beliefs, myths and rituals of a place? That’s what Masque of Africa by VS Naipaul is all about. The book excludes (or includes very briefly) everything that a reader interested in Africa would like to know, like its current economic prosperity, its effects and politics. The Masque of Africa is about how the continent’s medieval beliefs and practices have survived the wave of modernity in Africa.

Naipaul focuses on economic development in Africa only to the extent of pointing out the lack of it, eloquently describing impoverished children devoid, as he argues, of any future, lack of hygiene, bad roads etc.

But frankly, despite these deficiencies the book works. The book is well researched and presents a lot of information that, however repulsive, will hold the reader. We all know Africa is a land of strange practices but we didn’t know how strange they could be. Some eating habits – like cat and bat meat – and rituals are really strange. In South Africa, a cruel ritual performed in the streets takes Naipaul aback challenging his belief that liberation would have softened a people.

The book does not completely steer clear of worldly pursuits like politics and history. It documents the history of many places; one of them is the anti-apartheid movement. Naipaul also presents an interesting biographical piece on Gandhi.

This was my second Naipaul travel book. After reading his Million Mutinies Now, I had been looking forward to the arrival of this book. I’m not fully satisfied, nor does it compare favorably with his Million Mutinies Now. But to hold your reader with a topic as staid as African belief is a feat not many can achieve.

A Million Mutinies Now - A Book on Cities and People

Currently I am reading a travel book and ever since I started reading the book, my hands were itching to write a short take on it. The book is A Million Mutinies Now by VS Naipaul. This is my first Naipaul book – and although I had read travel articles and essays both in books and magazines, this is the first time I am reading a book solely dedicated to travel.

There is nothing new to say about Naipaul as a writer because, as a Nobel Prize winner, he is among the most written about. But, when you read a book, you develop your own views about the writer and some of them can be distinct from commonly held ones. So I decided to put mine here.

The book is on India and it gives glimpses of various facets of Indian life through the lives of people staying in Indian metropolis. The book shows how very ordinary things - ordinary people, their lives and struggle - can be your window to a city, its character, politics, economy and history. There is also a little about the rural India that the writer sees as he travels through various parts of the country. Naipaul interviews people and narrates their lives in a story-telling manner. Every person he interviews throws up a distinct side of a city.

The picture of Naipaul that emerges through his writing is very different from how the media paint him – a literary snob with no patience for others opinions. There is no snobbery in how he deals with his characters except when their occasional English (they mostly speak in native language and there is a person translating it into English for Naipaul) doesn’t meet his approval. But he likes to call a spade a spade: a vegetable market that's dirty and smelly is a vegetable market that's dirty and smelly. While narrating his characters' lives, his thrust is on storytelling and he tells the stories with empathy and understanding without being judgmental. At the same time, he captures minute details of how his characters live and behave bringing their worlds alive.

I have not finished the book but sensed that Naipaul’s writing is addictive. Once you take a dip, he pulls you deeper and deeper, disallowing you to keep the book shut for too long.