A Bend in the River

Nov 10, 2025 1:19 AM

Author:V. S. Naipaul,Patrick Marnham

A Bend in the River

Post-colonial Africa is dissected with pitiless lucidity in this disturbing novel about an outsider, the young Indian trader, Salim, who has moved from the coastal settlement where he grew up to an unnamed country in the African interior (largely based on the Democratic Republic of Congo), settling on that very bend in the river where Conrad had set his Heart of Darkness some seventy years before. Salim enters a ghost town, once a flourishing European outpost, which is fast returning to the bush. A new dictator 'the Big Man' is about to impose his regime with the assistance of Raymond, 'The Big Man's White Man', whose humanitarian concerns have won him international acclaim, but whose plans for the country's future are arrogant and delusional. Salim becomes obsessed by Raymond's wife, Yvette, and begins and affair with her. Personal and political tragedy follow, civil war returns, and Salim, contemplating the disastrous course of his life since leaving home, speaks for the powerlessness of ordinary people everywhere in the face of historical upheaval: 'I couldn't protect anyone [and] no one could protect me... we could only in various ways hide from the truth... One tide of history has brought us here ... Another tide of history was coming to wash us away.'.

Reviews

Brilliant and terrifying

—— Observer

Naipaul has fashioned a work of intense imaginative force. It is a haunting creation, rich with incident and human bafflement, played out in an immense detail of landscape rendered with a poignant brilliance.

—— Elizabeth Hardwick

Wild, thrilling. . . Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked

—— Sunday Times

Exhilarating. . . . Only in the calm madness of his magical realism can Murakami truly capture one of his obsessions, the usually ineffable yearning that drives a person to make art

—— Washington Post

Expansive and intricate . . . touches on many of the themes familiar in Mr. Murakami’s novels: the mystery of romantic love, the weight of history, the transcendence of art, the search for elusive things just outside our grasp

—— New York Times

I found it totally gripping with scarcely a dull page, the loose ends enhancing its mystery. An absorbing work by a great writer

—— Daily Express

An immersive big-hearted new novel

—— Independent

Written in a simple, readable style that leaves you free to concentrate on the weirdness of the content… There is no other writer able to give us the fix that his unique qualities provide

—— Sunday Express

In this novel, [Murakami] captures the creative process compellingly… The complex landscape that Murakami assembles in Killing Commendatore is a word portrait of the artist’s inner life

—— Times Literary Supplement

Murakami keeps the reader gripped

—— The Week

Murakami dancing along ‘the inky blackness of the Path of Metaphor’ is like Fred Astaire dancing across a floor, then up the walls and onto the ceiling... Killing Commendatore is a perfect balance of tradition and individual talent

—— Spectator

Rich, sprawling… Killing Commendatore is a… powerful, sustained meditation on how we engage with works of art

—— Daily Telegraph

Brilliant… Murakami is good company, that most precious of qualities in an author

—— Xan Brooks , Guardian

Murakami has produced a captivating novel, full of otherworldly detours and fascinating digressions

—— Jane Shilling , Daily Mail

One of the most influential novelists of his generation

—— Observer

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