A Bend in the River [With Earbuds]

First published in 1979, a Bend in the River is a novel of the politics and society of postcolonial Africa. Salim, a young Indian man, moves to a town on a bend in the river of a recently independent nation. As Salim strives to establish his business, he comes to be closely involved with the fluid and dangerous politics of the newly created state, the remnants of the old regime clashing inevitably with the new.

In awarding V. S. Naipaul the Nobel prize for literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy called him a "literary circumnavigator" and a "modern philosophe." Both tags seem spot-on, given Naipaul's gift for describing -- in both his fictional and nonfictional studies of India, Africa, and beyond -- the humor and pathos of cultural collisions.