The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist [than V. S. Naipaul]; but the propagandists and official spokesmen for the underdeveloped nations will find little to encourage them in Naipaul's cold-eyed fictional descriptions and journalistic reports. Where they would proclaim a decent hope and a revolutionary indignation, he sees stagnation, futility, and a sinister darkness as opaque as that which confounds Conrad's Mr. Kurtz and Greene's burnt-out case. His view of native possibilities in lands unregulated by white men seems no less dim than Evelyn Waugh's, though Naipaul's farce awakens fear sooner than laughter, and is informed not by a visitor's quizzical amusement but by a pained, partial identification….
"A Bend in the River" struck me as an advance—broader, warmer, less jaded and kinky—over the much-praised "Guerrillas," though not quite as vivid and revelatory as the fiction of "In a Free State." There, in the two short stories "One Out of Many" and "Tell Me Who to Kill," the cataclysmic inner adjustments forced upon those of the world's poor who immigrate to Western metropolises are sketched with a fond accent and a gaiety of invention rare in Naipaul's rather stern later fiction…. Naipaul has written little that is better [than his "In a Free State"], and little better has been written about modern Africa. "A Bend in the River" is carved from the same territory—an Africa of withering colonial vestiges, terrifyingly murky politics, defeated pretensions, omnivorous rot, and the implacable undermining of all that would sustain reason and safety. (p. 141)
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