Book of a lifetime: A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul

From The Independent archive: Neel Mukherjee reflects on a profound meditation that achieves nothing short of an archaeology of the destiny of nations and peoples

VS Naipaul at home in 2001 (PA)

A Bend in the River was published when Naipaul was nearly 50. One of the greatest novels about the process of “becoming” (as opposed to “being”) a nation, especially after the colonising powers have departed, it is tense with a taut hyper-awareness and knowledge of every nuance, subtext, context and history of the various mix of peoples in the unnamed central African country where the book is located.

Indwellers; assimilated and semi-assimilated Arab traders; erstwhile slave classes now racially intermingled with the Arabs who used to own them; the bush or village Africans; Europeans; the diasporic peoples of the Indian Ocean (to which our first-person narrator, Salim, belongs); visitors; expatriates... White Teeth wasn’t quite the first multicultural novel. “After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities,” remarks Salim.

Each time I come to A Bend in the River, I seem to read a new book. At times, it is a book about the tension between being and becoming, played out on the bass and treble clefs of the individual and the global; at others, about the silent, patient rage of history; about how free, if at all, one can be of history and its burdens.