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Quote by V. S. Naipaul

Work

A Bend in the River

Published in 1979 by the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, this novel explores the experience of a young Indian man who leaves his home to work in a trading post in a fictional East African country navigating its transition from colonial rule to independence. The protagonist observes the social and political transformations occurring around him as modern influences collide with traditional African life. The narrative examines complex themes including the disruptions of rapid social change, the challenges of building a new nation, and the personal dislocations of those caught between different worlds. The story reflects Naipaul's characteristic nuanced observation of post-colonial societies and the human costs of political idealism colliding with reality. more

Author

V. S. Naipaul
V. S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul, born on August 17, 1932, is a British writer known for his sharp observations and profound insights. His works primarily focus on themes such as colonialism, race, class, and identity, deeply revealing the complexities and contradictions of human society. Naipaul has won the Nobel Prize in Literature and is considered one of the most outstanding writers of the 20th century. more

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“How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.”

“I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.”

“Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.”

“Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.”

“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”