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A review by alexdv2019
A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
Did not finish book. Stopped at 52%.
This book is not for me. I was potentially interested to get a story about post colonial Africa from the point of view of an outsider, Salim, who is descended from an Indian family that previously moved to the eastern coast of Africa. What I got was instead a rambling that deals with pretty vague concepts and ideas that the author just wants you to take at face value, including how “Africans” appear to just be one big monolithic group who naturally steer towards destruction when they don’t have a towering authority over them to keep them in line. First it was the colonial Europeans, then it becomes the character referred to as “The Big Man” who becomes dictator of the unnamed country that’s supposed to be a stand-in for “the Congo.”
While I see value in reading authors with different viewpoints from my own, I admit that I let the fact that VS Naipaul won a Nobel prize in literature affect my judgement too much. They hand those prizes out all the time to people that really don’t merit them, it’s kind of a silly process when you think about it. A quick google search showed me that he was controversial during his life for allegations of domestic abuse and racist theories/views. It definitely comes clear during the book that he regards Black people in a very negative way. I stopped trying to keep reading just after Salim begins an affair with the young white wife of a European intellectual who previously tutored the Big Man. The love scene this creates really feels like the author trying to make himself sound like some kind of sexual master, he’s just so smart and so good at everything.
This really just felt like a nonstop ego fest, not a Nobel. I got this book for free from my college campus just before graduating, and I think it was previously used as a political theory or political lit class. There’s not enough meaning from this text to get much of that, in my opinion. It is all tainted by the author’s well documented high esteem of himself and skating over critical (read: any) specific details of the decolonization period, specifically in the huge context of the entire continent of Africa.
Not worth your time, and I regret putting so much of my own into it. I’m only giving it 2 stars because I got about 80 percent through my copy; there were maybe a handful of quotes or insights I genuinely found worth going back to and considering, but everything else felt like a slog the entire time and hoping it would get better.
While I see value in reading authors with different viewpoints from my own, I admit that I let the fact that VS Naipaul won a Nobel prize in literature affect my judgement too much. They hand those prizes out all the time to people that really don’t merit them, it’s kind of a silly process when you think about it. A quick google search showed me that he was controversial during his life for allegations of domestic abuse and racist theories/views. It definitely comes clear during the book that he regards Black people in a very negative way. I stopped trying to keep reading just after Salim begins an affair with the young white wife of a European intellectual who previously tutored the Big Man. The love scene this creates really feels like the author trying to make himself sound like some kind of sexual master, he’s just so smart and so good at everything.
This really just felt like a nonstop ego fest, not a Nobel. I got this book for free from my college campus just before graduating, and I think it was previously used as a political theory or political lit class. There’s not enough meaning from this text to get much of that, in my opinion. It is all tainted by the author’s well documented high esteem of himself and skating over critical (read: any) specific details of the decolonization period, specifically in the huge context of the entire continent of Africa.
Not worth your time, and I regret putting so much of my own into it. I’m only giving it 2 stars because I got about 80 percent through my copy; there were maybe a handful of quotes or insights I genuinely found worth going back to and considering, but everything else felt like a slog the entire time and hoping it would get better.