A Congo Diary

This diary served as the basis of Naipaul's masterpiece, A Bend in the River, which is the story of an Indian, uprooted by war, who has come to live in an isolated town along a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us a most convincing and disturbing view of a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.