After the completion of his earlier Caribbean novels, V. S. Naipaul began his extended travels and subsequent writings inspired by those travels. A Bend in the River (1979) results from such an undertaking. The story in A Bend in the River depicts how an emergent African nation struggles against all odds to be a modernized one. Despite episodes on internal warfare and corruption that effect migration in and out of the country, it is obvious that …showed first 75 words of 1366 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1366 total…shelves. They were masks that had been laid low, in more than one way, and had lost their power. (65) This disorderly world is further intensified by the effect of a renewed time framework. Father Huismans plays God by marking every collected mask a date, cutting off the masks from its immediate temporal and spatial references. De-territorialized, decontextualized, and stripped of life and meaning, these dated masks produce an anachronism to Salim: "So old, so new" (65).