Heart of Darkness

A Bend in the River By V. S. Naipaul Knopf, 278 pp., $8.95 North of South By Shiva Naipaul Simon and Schuster, 349 pp., $10.95 Here are two books of high purpose by two West Indian brothers. Shiva is 13 years the junior of V.S. This is V. S. Naipaul’s eighth novel and 15th book. Shiva Naipaul has written two novels and some excellent short stories. Their new books both treat of the same subject: the Asian outsider in Third World African countries. Their terrain is the same on other levels as well: they find madness, tyranny, chicanery, the very cheap cost of human life, corruption, inexplicability at every turn—in short, the human condition just underneath the cloak of leftist or nationalist rhetoric. Both books reflect a feeling of hopelessness and despair about the Third World.

Shiva Naipaul’s North of South is a book of travel through Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia. It reads asifitis bursting with the need to expand (and contract) into a novel. It lacks the mercy and objectivity of fiction, yet it is written, brilliantly, with a novelist’s eye and ear. V. S. Naipaul, meanwhile, has written an austere novel whose strengths (vivid atmosphere, historical and political knowledge, parody) are occasionally swallowed up by its novelistic failures (nebulous, archetypal characters; a narrator who is primarily an observer, a conduit for Naipaul’s vision; lack of dramatic action). Its clarity is in its reportage, not in its fiction. Shiva shouts and rages, V.S. whispers and implies.

DE

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David Evanier

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A Bend in the River By V. S. Naipaul Knopf, 278 pp., $8.95 North of South By Shiva Naipaul Simon and Schuster, 349 pp., $10.95 Here are two books of high purpose by two West Indian brothers. Shiva is 13 years the junior of V.S. This is V. S. Naipaul’s eighth novel and 15th book. Shiva Naipaul has written two novels and some excellent short stories. Their new books both treat of the same subject: the Asian outsider in Third World African countries. Their terrain is the same on other levels as well: they find madness, tyranny, chicanery, the very cheap cost of human life, corruption, inexplicability at every turn—in short, the human condition just underneath the cloak of leftist or nationalist rhetoric. Both books reflect a feeling of hopelessness and despair about the Third World.

Shiva Naipaul’s North of South is a book of travel through Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia. It reads asifitis bursting with the need to expand (and contract) into a novel. It lacks the mercy and objectivity of fiction, yet it is written, brilliantly, with a novelist’s eye and ear. V. S. Naipaul, meanwhile, has written an austere novel whose strengths (vivid atmosphere, historical and political knowledge, parody) are occasionally swallowed up by its novelistic failures (nebulous, archetypal characters; a narrator who is primarily an observer, a conduit for Naipaul’s vision; lack of dramatic action). Its clarity is in its reportage, not in its fiction. Shiva shouts and rages, V.S. whispers and implies.