A Bend in the River

Don't know where I picked up a copy of this 1979 VS Naipaul novel about a South Asian merchant from the coast of an unnamed East African nation who migrates a sleepy town in the nation's interior after some political dislocation on the coast. While he's there a new regime rises and drifts towards more and more authoritarianism. 

Ever for someone with a background in Russian literature, Naipaul novels tend to move rather slowly (based on a sample of two novels, admittedly). For a while the whole thing was rather bogged down. Then a compatriot of his from the Indian community on the coast shows up in town, riding shotgun with a new development including a Polytechnic institute and some expatriots up the river a few miles. Eventually our hero gets integrated into that community and, fortunately for the reader, having frequent sex with this Belgian woman. Though the sex isn't described in a lot of salacious detail, it's nice to feel our narrator's pulse quicken, and the plot with it.

Ultimately he travels to London and then back again, only to find the cordon of the state tightening around him. It's pretty dicey thereafter.

Overall a good solid novel. Naipaul has his own groove and takes us places we mightn't otherwise go. It's important as well that as an author he precedes the highly moralizing tone of most later "post-colonial" literature, and indeed that the South Asian commercial communities in Africa occupy something of an interstitial space between the all-too often Manichean struggle of "natives" and "colonizers" that undergirds so much later fiction of the developing world, much like the Chinese merchants we see in the novels of Naipaul's Indonesian contemporary Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose Buru Quartet I should go back and read again.