In 2001, the Swedish Academy awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature – long considered to be the highest achievement in literature – to Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, more popularly known as V.S. Naipaul. Considered by many as one of the greatest writers of his generation, he was a shoo-in for the honor. Among his most popular works is A Bend in the River, a thought-provoking literary masterpiece that transports the readers into a region that is still at odds with itself following decades of colonialism. Through an eclectic set of characters whose fortunes converged on the titular town on the bend in the river, Naipaul was able to evocatively draw the landscape of contemporary Africa, its people, its traditions, and even the maladies that plagued and continue to plague the region. In this quotable quote update, I am sharing lines that captured my interest.
Do check out my complete review of Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s latest novel by clicking here.
“And there is something else about the airplane. You can go back many times to the same place. And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn’t exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. That is the way we have to learn to live now. The past is here.”
~ Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, A Bend in the River
“When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people, but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor my grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.”
~ Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, A Bend in the River
“A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty. The beauty of numbers. When it drops to ten again he waits for it to get back to eighteen. When it drops to two he wait for it to get back to ten. Well, it get backs there. But he has wasted a quarter of his life. And all he’s got out of his money is a little mathematical excitement.”
~ Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, A Bend in the River
“But at night, if you were on the river, it was another thing. You felt the land taking you back to something that was familiar, something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there. You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always.”
~ Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, A Bend in the River
“If you look at a column of ants on the march you will see that there are some who are stragglers or have lost their way. The column has no time for them; it goes on. Sometimes the stragglers die. But even this has no effect on the column. There is a little disturbance around the corpse, which is eventually carried off – and then it appears so light. And all the time the great busyness continues, and that apparent sociability, that rite of meeting and greeting which ants travelling in opposite directions, to and from their nest, perform without fail.”
~ Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, A Bend in the River
“The tall lilac-coloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it “the new thing” or “the new thing in the river,” and to them it was another enemy. Its rubbery vines and leaves formed thick tangles of vegetation that adhered to the river banks and clogged up waterways. It grew fast, faster than men could destroy it with the tools they had. The channels to the villages had to be constantly cleared. Night and day the wter hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it travelled.”
~ Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, A Bend in the River
“I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn’t made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn’t have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.”