Eva Peron

Words: 618
Pages: 3

Naipaul’s recognition of the flagrant insecurity of life in the absence of the rule of law was spurred by a frightening happenstance the year before he began work on A Bend in the River. In his essay “Argentina and the Ghost of Eva Peron,” the author presents a vivid account of his detention by policemen in the northern Argentinian region of Jujuy. It was only his possession of a distinctively shaped tobacco pipe that saved him from further detention and possible execution: the pipe’s odd appearance, more British than European and certainly not Argentinian, convinced local officials that Naipaul was in fact a foreigner and so “por no interesar su detención.”2 Naipaul was released, but having come so near to torture if not death, he found it …show more content…
Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo. This was the period in which Mobuto attempted to transform the Congo into a revolutionary society of citoyens and citoyennes modeled on a number of dictatorial regimes, including that of Mao Zedong. This was the tense phase in which, having rejected the remaining vestiges of colonial rule, Mobutu led his country in a socialist experiment in which much of the nation’s private property was confiscated and redistributed by the state and, subsequently, the country descended into poverty and authoritarianism. Though not intended as a historical account per se, and certainly not limited to central Africa in its implications, A Bend in the River offers a detailed depiction of a similarly unravelling state in which individual lives are at the mercy of corrupt civil servants who terrorize the population with the president’s assent. In Naipaul’s fictionalized account, even the system of river commerce, from time immemorial the primary means of distribution for food and goods, is foreclosed as travel becomes perilous. With the photograph of the president displayed everywhere, “getting bigger and bigger, and the quality of the prints finer” (168), the ruler attempts to govern by the force of his personality, but failing that he soon resorts to mere force. Inevitably, this process is accompanied by a declining standard of living as resources are confiscated to prop up the