new out of Africa (ex Africa). Huismans applied it jokingly to the unique masks and carvings with religious quality he had collected. Comments Naipaul is recognised as a "magnificent novelist", and A Bend in the River has been described as a "full-bodied masterpiece". Yet he has been accused of being a "neo-colonialist", and in this novel post-colonial Africa is depicted as spiralling into a kind of Hell. He has also been accused of being "infected by an ancestral communal resentment" against blacks. 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". 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". Howe rejects the notion that Naipaul is an apologist of colonialism. 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 who gets dumped later. Howe bemoans the fact that, as he sees it, Naipaul offers no hope, and that he allows "the wretchedness of his depicted scene" to become "the limit of his vision". Selwyn Cudjoe thinks that the novel depicts "the gradual darkening of African society as it returns to its age-old condition of bush and blood" and thinks this pessimistic view indicates Naipaul's "inability to examine postcolonial societies in any depth". 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". Imraan Coovadia examines Naipaul's Latin quotations, accuses him of misquotation and manipulation, and suggests that he tries to evoke fear, disgust and condescension. Raja suggests that the novel is less about a conflict of modernity and Third World development, but more about a representation from a bourgeois perspective, Salim being interested, not in revolutionary goals, but in maintaining a profitable enterprise. 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". In 2001, without specifically referring to this novel, the Nobel Literature Prize