A Bend In The River

After the completion of his earlier Caribbean novels, V. S. Naipaul began his extended travels and subsequent writings inspired by those travels. A Bend in the River (1979) results from such an undertaking. The story in A Bend in the River depicts how an emergent African nation struggles against all odds to be a modernized one. Despite episodes on internal warfare and corruption that effect migration in and out of the country, it is obvious that …

…shelves. They were masks that had been laid low, in more than one way, and had lost their power. (65) This disorderly world is further intensified by the effect of a renewed time framework. Father Huismans plays God by marking every collected mask a date, cutting off the masks from its immediate temporal and spatial references. De-territorialized, decontextualized, and stripped of life and meaning, these dated masks produce an anachronism to Salim: "So old, so new" (65).