Enigma of Arrival

by V.S. Naipaul

Book Overview

The autobiographical novel of a journey from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394509714
• ISBN13: 9780394509716
• Release Date: February 1987
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 354 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Time scale of change...

This book describes the feeling of being thrown into a society that one does not belong to, where it's impossible to belong because , first, the past (the writer's old culture) has been disconnected from him, and, second, in the modern society the external circumstances change too fast and unpleasantly for the mind and soul to adapt. The book is about a fragment of modern English-speaking society, seen from the perspective of an acute observer from a wildly different culture. The observer's original culture was destroyed by immigration, and he tries to interpret fragments of it from his childhood, like the meaning of sweeping the dirt outside the house each morning. From a related perspective, one can also read Spengler's 'Decline of the West', and John Berger's Pig Earth.I picked up this book and began reading it at a friend's weekend house and couldn't stop. So, I bought my own copy. That was thirteen years ago. This remains one of my favorite books, in memory. The haiunting cover piece, from a painting by de Chirico, fits the message very well.

Exquisite and haunting

I failed to engage with this book at all on my first attempt.A few years later, I read it in a few days.The prose is plaintively beautiful, precise and often neutral.The emotions and 'story' controlled by the prose are almost unbearably painful.I am astonished by what V.S Naipaul achieved in this book.

Definitely not for everybody, but...

I'll admit that I was really puzzled by this book when I started reading it. Very little happens. There is not much of a plot, at least as we usually think of it. I found myself wondering things like "what is he writing about" and "where is he going with all this detailed description?" The title aside, the book itself seemed like an enigma. But after a while I began to get almost hypnotized by the narrative. And two things in particular really captured my attention. First, the very precise and painstaking psychological (and even behavioral) analysis of the characters in the book. To a great extent it reminded me of the level of detail that Dostoyevsky would go to in his psychological examinations of his characters. Second, the almost zen-like mindfulness of his description of setting. I was really astonished by the scope of the writer's attention, and his skill at simply noticing and describing ordinary things in a really extraordinary way.So - no "action", not much plot, excruciatingly dull if you're looking for a thrill-a-minute page turner. However, if you can let yourself sort of mimic the mindset of the author and just go with it a bit, I think you'll find this to be a pretty amazing book.

Strange and beautiful

Without question this is a strange book. It has no real plot, the arrangement of its sections is odd and their relationship to each other somewhat mysterious, and the attention to detail can be maddening. When I first attempted to read this book some years ago, I had to stop part of the way through, as I couldn't understand what was going on or why Naipaul had written this.Fortunately I tried again not long afterwards; Naipaul is one of my favorite writers and I figured anything he wrote was worth at least a second try. The second time round I read much more slowly than the first time, trying to savor the precision of the prose and enter into the narrative more fully. The book's effect on me was dramatically different as a result. I became absorbed in the reading ("hypnotic" is how one review I read aptly described the prose), and I began to see the book's underlying themes: the existentialist need to make one's own place in the world in the face of decay and death, the power of art to transform experience and fight oblivion, how the writer sees and knows the world. Naipaul develops these themes slowly and subtly; they are woven deeply into the narrative, and can be easy to miss for that reason. But once you begin to see them, reading this beautiful book can be a profound and moving experience.And so, despite the strangeness and the hard, slow reading this book requires, I would tell people that it is so worth the effort of careful study. Naipaul has written no ordinary novel here, but something rare and beautiful. A truly great book.

"Spare, enigmatic, serious and perfectly controlled writing"

This gorgeous book, a memoir and novel intermingled, is one of the strangest and most hypmotic I have ever read. V.S. Naipaul is known, unfairly, almost exclusively as a political and travel writer; few critics seem to have noted the extraordinary beauty and intelligence of his work or its profoundly personal, philosophical underpinnings. Here Naipaul, with no exotic backdrop or apalling human decline to reflect upon, comes out of the dark shadows and reveals himself as a kind of ascetic Proust. In spare, deeply controlled prose, he writes of his walks through the English countryside where he lives, and what he sees. While Naipaul is falling in love, late in life, with his adopted home, it is becoming disfigured by time and change, and soon what he loved is lost. His attempts to cope with that change, to avoid grief, to see coldly and without sentiment, shape the book. The overall effect is, in fact, much like that of Proust, but maybe wiser and certainly less indulgent. But it demands patience and reflection (Naipaul's thick-headed protege Paul Theroux didn't get it), so be warned.