The novel, telling the story of Salim, a merchant in post-colonial mid-20th century Africa, is one of Naipaul's best known works and was widely praised.

Ferdinand attends the local lycée run by Father Huismans, a Belgian priest who collects African masks and is considered a "lover of Africa".

Mahesh, a fellow Indian trader, says that the local Africans are "malins" (i.e. wicked), "because they lived with the knowledge of men as prey".

Yet buildings are shoddy, the tractors at the agricultural centre never get put to work, and much of the Domain falls quickly into disrepair.

Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi This Latin phrase is still visible to Salim on the granite base of a ruined European monument near the dock.

"He approves of the mingling of the peoples and their bonds of union", derived from Virgil's Aeneid, Book IV, line 112.

Aeneas lands on the shores of Africa, falls in love with Queen Dido and wants to settle, putting his mission, the migration to Italy, in danger.

[9] Jennifer Seymour Whitaker indicates that Salim's plight as an outsider, a member of the Indian community in Africa, is credibly rendered, but takes Naipaul to task for ascribing to African people a "mysterious malevolence".

[11] Irving Howe admires Naipaul's "almost Conradian gift for tensing a story", the psychic and moral tension of the novel, and its "serious involvement with human issues".

He contrasts the foreground space occupied by Salim with the background acts set in motion by the Big Man.

The Big Man never appears but finds a voice in Raymond, the white intellectual whom the President promotes but later ignores.

Howe bemoans the fact that, as he sees it, Naipaul allows "the wretchedness of his depicted scene" to become "the limit of his vision".

[13] The novel examines "the homeless condition of the East Indian in a world he cannot call home" and shows in Salim's case his passage to free himself from "the constricting ties to his society's past".

[13] Imraan Coovadia examines Naipaul's Latin quotations, accuses him of misquotation and manipulation, and suggests that he tries to evoke fear, disgust and condescension.

[14] Massod Raja suggests that the novel takes an essentially bourgeois perspective, Salim being interested, not in revolutionary goals, but in maintaining a profitable enterprise.

[15] He asserts that Naipaul is not a postcolonial author but a "cosmopolitan" one (as defined by Timothy Brennan), who offers an "inside view of formerly submerged peoples" for target audiences that have "metropolitan literary tastes".

[15] In 2001, without specifically referring to this novel, the Nobel Literature Prize Committee indicated that it viewed Naipaul as Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings.

Thus the reader learns that the town is located in the heart of Africa, at the end of the navigable river, just below the cataracts, and the European colonisers had been French-speaking, perhaps Belgians.

[11][14] Naipaul credits his extramarital affair with Margaret Gooding for giving A Bend in the River and his later books greater fluidity, saying that these "in a way to some extent depend on her.