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 there is a continuous thematic concern in the
novel. This thematic concern is structured around a dualism of rootedness and displacement, one that
Naipaul explores the identity and cultural formations of the diaspora. This thematic consistency, therefore, does not preclude Naipaul's credibility of being a superb world novelist as Ian Watt once said of him. On the contrary, issues that engross the novelist's unwavered attention become particularly
urgent under the turbulence due to faster and more intensified exchanges under globalization.
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