A Bend in the River: Introduction by Patrick Marnham (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series) - Hardcover

Naipaul, V. S.

 
9781101908198: A Bend in the River: Introduction by Patrick Marnham (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 110190819X ISBN 13: 9781101908198
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Widely hailed as the Nobel Prize-winning author’s greatest work, this novel takes us into the life of a young Indian man who moves to an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. • "Brilliant." —The New York Times

In this haunting masterpiece of postcolonial literature, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979, Naipaul gives us a convincing and disturbing vision of a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past.

Salim is doubly an outsider in his new home—an unnamed country that resembles the Congo—by virtue of his origins in a community of Indian merchants on the coast of East Africa. Uncertain of his future, he has come to take possession of a local trading post he has naively purchased sight unseen. But what Salim discovers on his arrival is a ghost town, reduced to ruins in the wake of the recently departed European colonizers and in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding forest. Salim struggles to build his business against a backdrop of growing chaos, conflict, ignorance, and poverty.

His is a journey into the heart of Africa, into the same territory explored by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlier—but witnessed this time from the other side of the tragedy of colonization. Salim discovers that the nation’s violent legacy persists, through the rise of a dictator who calls himself the people’s savior but whose regime is built on fear and lies.

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

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

V. S. NAIPAUL was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England in 1950, spent four years at Oxford, and began to write in 1954 in London. His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Enigma of Arrival, and In a Free State, which won the Booker Prize. His works of nonfiction 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.

PATRICK MARNHAM is an English writer, known for his biographies of Diego Rivera and Georges Simenon. He has served as literary editor of The Spectator and Paris correspondent for The Independent. He is the recipient of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Marsh Biography Award.

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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...

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Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
110190819X
ISBN 13 
9781101908198
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
312
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