The Enigma of Arrival

by V.S. Naipaul

Taking its title from the strangely frozen picture by the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of Arrival tells the story of a young Indian from the Caribbean arriving in post-imperial England and consciously, over many years, finding himself as a writer. It is the story of a journey, from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another, and is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet alongside this he weaves a rich and complex web of invention and observation. Finding depth and pathos in the smallest moments the death of a cottager, the firing of an estate's gardener Naipaul also comprehends the bigger picture watching as the old world is lost to the gradual but permanent changes wrought on the English landscape by the march of 'progress'. This is a moving and beautiful novel told with great dignity, compassion and candour. 'Written with the expected beauty of style ...Instead

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Nobel Prize, Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Travel

387 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

V. S. Naipaul was a British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent known for his sharp, often controversial explorations of postcolonial societies, identity, and displacement. His works, which include both fiction and nonfiction, often depict themes of exile, cultural alienation, and the lingering effects of colonialism.
He gained early recognition with A House for Mr Biswas, a novel inspired by his father’s struggles in Trinidad. His later works, such as The Mimic Men, In a Free State, and A Bend in the River, cemented his reputation as a masterful and incisive writer. Beyond fiction, his travelogues and essays, including Among the Believers and India: A Million Mutinies Now, reflected his critical perspective on societies in transition.
Naipaul received numerous accolades throughout his career, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for his ability to blend deep observation with literary artistry. While praised for his prose, his often unsparing portrayals of postcolonial nations and controversial statements sparked both admiration and criticism.

Reviews

[William2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just a note here. I've read this book twice and have an observation that I haven't come across elsewhere. In short, it's that there is a vertiginous aspect to Naipaul's descriptions of landscape here. I never have a stable sense of the world around the narrator, but one that is always off-kilter, if not spinning. This is something that I've not come across in Naipaul's other books, most of which I've read. I'm thinking now it may just be a function of over-description, in which case the attentive reader is overloaded with stimuli. So a mysterious but very good book which I recommend.

Later note: Yes, It is over-description, which creates a defamiliarizing or alienating effect on the reader. To the best of my knowledge, it was first described as an aspect of Russian Formalism.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Enigma of Arrival is named after the painting by Giorgio de Chirico – in a way any arrival to some new place is an enigma for the one who arrives. As a clueless youth the narrator, cherishing the grand ideas of becoming a writer, – V. S. Naipaul himself – arrives to London and, after being educated in Oxford, he lives in England as a stranger among strangers…

That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange.

The Enigma of Arrival is a story of decline and fall – deterioration of the old ways of living and an inexorable power of entropy. And in these aspects the novel may be considered as a brilliant complement to The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald.

I lived not with the idea of decay – that idea I quickly shed – so much as with the idea of change. I lived with the idea of change, of flux, and learned, profoundly, not to grieve for it. I learned to dismiss this easy cause of so much human grief. Decay implied an ideal, a perfection in the past. But would I have cared to be in my cottage while the sixteen gardeners worked? When every growing plant aroused anxiety, every failure pain or criticism? Wasn’t the place now, for me, at its peak? Finding myself where I was, I thought – after the journey that had begun so long before – that I was blessed.

Some of us live in this world as hosts and some are just guests and observers.

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Purposedly boring, yet purposedly exciting. I used to think it is not possible for a book to be both boring and exciting until I read this autobiographical work.

So far, what I know of V.S. Naipul I got only from this book. His parents were from India who had migrated to the island of Trinidad ( with the other island nearby, Tobago, it completes the country of "Trinidad and Tobago" near Venezuela where the beauty queens are). Since this was before large oil and gas reserves were discovered there, they had lived in relative poverty and want. But Victor (V. S. Naipul) was apparently a bright kid. He got a scholarship and, at the very young age of eighteen, left Trinidad in 1950 for England, alone. He studied for four years at Oxford then began to write. My copy of the book has this golden sticker saying "Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature" but I do not know (as I'm too lazy to google) what year was it when he was awarded this. In any event, he does not mention it here.

Neither does he mention how he got that life-changing scholarship at Oxford, what sort of a brilliant or promising young lad he was, how hard his life was in that impoverished island, the famous/important people he probably had met, or his successes maybe in Oxford and later as a writer. The usual things a writer of an autobiography would not have missed he ignored or played down. He wrote about his dreams, but they were not those general dreams that translate into ambitions like most of us have had during childhood, but dreams during particular nights, dates forgotten, while he was asleep. While in England, he stayed in a countryside cottage. Remembering this quiet, uneventful episode in his life, he wrote about his neighbor Jack, the car-hire man (taxi driver), his landlord he had seldom seen, the manor house caretakers, the gardener, new neighbors, deaths and departures, the changing seasons, the rooks (birds, not chess pieces), the cows which reminded him of the labels of canned condensed milk they had in Trinidad--things or people or events of daily life often ignored or forgotten, the simple annals of the insignificant, merging them with his lonely reminiscences and thoughts on history. Boring, boring, boring. Yet I kept on reading, reading and reading.

So it was that I discovered another great writer and my amazement was complete.

[Jayakrishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In A Wounded Civilization, V.S.Naipaul criticized Gandhi and Nehru for “their Hindu way of not seeing” – he wrote that neither Gandhi nor Nehru had any perspective about the places they visited and saw during their early days in England. Nobody would ever accuse V.S.Naipaul of the same ignorance after reading The Enigma of Arrival. In this autobiographical novel, Naipaul describes his idyllic but melancholic life in an old English manor in Wiltshire.

The novel, divided into five parts begins with the narrator (Naipaul) acquiring a sense of the landscape of the old English manor and the town during his daily walks. Even though his life in the manor has just begun, Naipaul immediately gets a sense of the change and decay in Wiltshire. Naipaul expresses sadness at the narrowing in of a previously unfenced walkway by a barbed wire fence in his second year in Wiltshire which he sees as an encroachment of antiquity. Naipaul’s elaborate description of the manor and Wiltshire gave me the impression of a man trying to belong to or make sense of his adopted nation’s landscape (Naipaul’s ancestors were brought to the Caribbean to work in the plantations and it was in the Caribbean that Naipaul spent his early years until he traveled to Britain to become a writer). The Enigma of Arrival (named after a painting by Giorgio de Chirico) is also about that first journey to England which Naipaul describes with admirable honesty and self reflection.

In between the elaborate descriptions of the Wiltshire landscape, Naipaul also observes the occupants of the town and the manor, but only from a distance. But this could be a literary technique because even though Naipaul’s detached tone indicates that he does not seek companionship with the servants, the failed writer, the car-hire man and the landlord of the manor, all of them confide in him. Naipaul describes or rather infers minute and delicate details of their lives. The landlord is a man in a state of acedia. The servants, with their petty jealousies and failures have no future. The car-hire man finds solace in religion and a vagrant woman. A gardener kills his beautiful but unfaithful wife. He sees the occupants of Wiltshire and the manor as a people in retreat. People who found the city life too overwhelming and sought emotional refuge in the country. All of them appear to be doomed. The tranquility and security of the manor is fragile. Naipaul seems to suggest that without proper authority and leadership England (represented by the manor which is a symbol of the old England whose antiquity is no longer sacrosanct) could plunge into decay. This feeling of insecurity about the fragility of social structures and the erosion of values was earlier explored by Naipaul in A Bend in the River in which Africa slowly plunges into anarchy.

But Enigma is not as grim as A Bend in the River. Before the end of his stay, Naipaul finds peace and fulfillment in the ways of the manor (though eventually he has to leave it). This is an interesting aspect of Naipaul’s writing. Naipaul never felt safe within his Hindu community in the Caribbean. He lived in a state of anomie and was ashamed of his community and its ways. Hence, this feeling of insecurity and lack of safety can be found in some of Naipaul’s other works whether it is through a lack of self worth (in The Mimic Men), travels to a new world (in Half a Life) or the threat of physical violence (in A Bend in the River).

Though the descriptions of the landscape (which forms a large part of the book) can be tedious and at times incomprehensible (for me atleast), Naipaul’s reflections about his own position in his adopted country and the impact of change on people make The Enigma of Arrival worth reading. It is a harrowing novel about the fragility of life and the inevitability of change which spares no one.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perfect example of writing that feels very staid and traditional until, about half way through the book, you pick your head up and realize that it's doing something completely original. Not exactly fiction, not exactly non-ficiton (not exactly poetry for that matter), but filled with lush sentences that relay the slow, unstoppable movemements of a vegetative mind, Naipaul's, thinking about a particular place and a particular time so well that the meditation becomes about Place and Time, rather than 1980s rural England. A book that doesn't call attention to itself and doesn't need to: it's thorough, and so devoted to its subject that the structure feels organic (not always a good word to use I guess, but this book in particular seems to deserve it). The 20th century Walden: making your house in a world where everything is constantly being torn down. And like Walden, a book in which every word feels completely tangible and completely transparent at the same time.

[Becky · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm pretty sure you can figure out what I think of a book from the page number/time spent to read ratio. I've read so many five star reviews for this book and I've found them baffling. Sure, it's a cyclical narrative. Not that difficult to pull off when absolutely nothing happens. I got so sick of the repetition, which is apparently also a sign of brilliance. Does deciding you're going to be "a writer" really make you see the world any differently? I can understand being a pompous teenager in a new country, but a pompous adult who writes ridiculously overlong purple passages with a complete lack of humour or spark about the English countryside and expects that to form a novel. Nah.

If this is a genius meditation on life, death, and the immigrant experience, then I'm the Queen of Sheba. One of the worst yet.

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of descriptions of a decaying landscape, building and society. At times a bit too repetitive although the repetitions probably contribute to the dreamlike quality, especially of the first part.

The story is autobiographical, set mostly during the time that the author lived in a rented cottage on the Wiltshire estate of the recluse Stephen Tennant.

I was particularly drawn to the moving descriptions of the lives of the people in the area that Naipaul had contact with.

To be read slowly.

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the kind of story that I could never imagine myself liking. Yet somehow Naipaul's purposely slow narrative manages to become something evocative and unforgettable. This is an autobiographical novel of Naipaul's lonely time during his middle age in the English countryside, as well as his early journey out of Trinidad as a youth. It is a rumination on the movement of people, the march of progress and the cycles of death and change that affect everyone and everything in the world around us. You have to read between the lines to see these weighty themes though. For all intents and purposes this book is just the story of Naipaul's life and thoughts during an outwardly unremarkable period of his life.

It strikes me that Naipaul was really one of the most perceptive writers in the English language. He manages to transform the ordinary lives and small fates of his neighbors in England — people similar to those any of us have known in our own lives — into something heartbreaking, beautiful and universal. No life is truly ordinary, nor is any tree, shrub or chain-link fence something without a message and story. The world around is in constant flux, rather than static or in a process of decay as we might assume. As an immigrant I also feel as Naupaul did in the English countryside, the slightly unnerving feeling that my presence in this part of the world is part of something unprecedented in history. This is a false feeling, however. The "new world" has been in a state of constant demographic change for hundreds of years and the established order that we find ourselves dropped into is usually of recent vintage.

Naipaul's descriptions of leaving Trinidad for the first time are earnest and poignant. I'll probably always remember the image of him eating the roast chicken he had brought him over the garbage can in his New York hotel room. Above all this book is the story of how he became a writer. He did it by ceasing to try and self-consciously become one, like the images of cool and knowing writers that he had in his head, but rather learning how to see the world through his own eyes. He is clearly a man who always took a keen interest in those around him. Somehow he found incredible stories in the ordinary people and landscapes that we pass over without thinking twice.

It's sobering to think that all the real people whose lives were described (albeit with fictional embellishments) in this book have now passed away, including recently Naipaul himself. I learned a lot more about Naipaul and how he saw the world from reading this. He was an immigrant at a time when the West was more obviously the preeminent civilization in the world and he had the learning, accepting attitude of someone who had arrived in a place with the intention of being civilized by it. Unlike those of us born here he felt himself to be a guest to some degree.

The one strange part of the book is that his wife is never mentioned once in the narrative, nor any of the other women who were part of his life. Nonetheless this is a strange, melancholy and brilliant autobiography. I wonder though if future generations will have the patience to read a book this intentionally slow? I think it is already becoming questionable.

[İpek Dadakçı · Rating 4 out of 5]

Çok güzel bir otobiyografik roman Gelişin Bilmecesi. Nobel Edebiyat Ödüllü yazar Naipaul, ailesi Hindistan’dan Karayipler’de bir ada ülkesi olan Trinidad’a göçünce burada doğmuş. Gazeteci olan babasının da etkisiyle genç yaşta edebiyatla ilgilenmeye başlamış ve 18 yaşındayken yazar olma arzusunun peşine düşerek Oxford’da burs kazanıp, tek başına İngiltere’ye göç etmiş. 1950’de ilk kez İngiltere’ye gelen yazar, bundan yirmi sene sonra Salisbury şehrinin küçük bir köyüne yerleşmiş ve yaklaşık yirmi sene burada kalmış. Gelişin Bilmecesi, çoğunlukla yazarın yirmi senesini geçirdiği bu köyü, köydeki bir malikaneyi, insanları ve köyün doğasını anlatımından oluşuyor.

İlk bölümde köyü, evleri ve doğasıyla uzun uzun anlatıyor Naipaul. O yüzden baştan söyleyeyim tasvir sevmeyen, olay odaklı olmayan metinlerde sıkılan bir okursanız pek sizlik bir roman değil. Ama ben yazarın cümlelerini ve anlatımını çok beğendim. Uzun uzun ve detaylıca her şeyi betimlemesine rağmen yormadan, gözünüzün önünde köyü yavaş yavaş resmediyor. Sevdiğim bir diğer nokta da köydeki bir malikanenin tarihi ve yıllar içinde geçirdiği değişimleri, ülkelerin ve dünyanın değişimi ve dönüşümüyle paralellik kurarak anlatması. Hint kültürünün etkisi altında ve bir sömürge ülkesinde büyümüş, sonrasında bu sömürgeler sayesinde refah içinde yaşayan bir ülkeye göçmüş biri olarak dünyanın iki farklı ucunu birleştiriyor adeta bu anlatımıyla.

Kitabın en sevdiğim kısmı olan ikinci bölümünde ise Naipaul on sekiz yaşına götürüyor bizi ve İngiltere’ye göç hikayesini anlatıyor her yönüyle. İlk kez ve tek başına genç yaşta ülkesinden ayrılıp, çok farklı bir kültüre ve ülkeye, yazar olmaya gitmesini anlatan, her anlamda çok güzel bir olgunlaşma hikayesi bu. Dünya bakışının oturması, hem bir göçmen hem de bir yazar olarak kimliğini keşfetmesi, büyüdüğü kültüre ve ülkeye dışarıdan bir gözle bakması ve çocukluğun romantizmiyle önyargılarını sorgulayıp ayakları yere basan bir yetişkin ve yazar olma yolculuğunu çok samimi ve etkileyici anlatmış Naipaul. Benim hakkında çok bilgi sahibi olduğum bir yazar değil, Gelişin Bilmecesi de yazarın okuduğum ilk kitabı ancak eleştirilenler dahil yazarın fikirlerinin köklerini anlamaya da yardımcı bana göre bu bölüm. Zaman zaman bana kendi göçümü anımsatması da hoşuma gitti.

Sonraki bölümlerde ise köyün yine detaylıca doğasını ve önceki bölümlerde anlattığı malikanenin bahçesini anlatıyor yazar. En sonlara doğru bu kadar uzatmasaydı keşke diye düşünürken bu kez de insanın hayat döngüsünü sokuyor devreye ve etkileyici bir nokta koyuyor romana.

Kısacası beğendim Gelişin Bilmecesi’ni. Yazara özel bir ilgim olmamasına rağmen büyük ilgiyle okudum. Anı ya da otobiyografi türünde okumaktan hoşlananlara tavsiye ederim.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling autobiographical book about a period of life where Naipaul lived in a cottage within a manor house grounds near Salisbury. He makes daily walks near Stonehenge.

The book is over descriptive on purpose on the day to day lives of the people and landscape where Naipaul lived. The book should be boring but I found myself memorized and fascinated by Naipaul’s description of the characters and his interpretation of their personalities and lives. It follows how their lives and the landscape are changing.

Jack and his garden, the owner of the manor house was once one of Waugh’s bright young things characters now suffering from several ailments. Mr and Mrs Philips the caretakers of the manor house and carer for the landlord. Pitton the gardener with his routine, Bray the taxi driver and other minor characters. The murder, Stonehenge, the authors walks and study of his surroundings with the changes, deaths, decay and analysis of what was happening.

I fond a paragraph in the final chapter where he talks about the death of his sister and the farewell ceremony which seemed to bring the narrative together.

‘The story has become more personal: my journey, the writer’s journey, the writer defined by his writing discoveries, his ways of seeing, rather than by his personal adventures, writer and man separating at the beginning of the journey and coming together again in a second life just before the end. ‘

Naipaul’s journey from Trinidad to Wiltshire and his philosophical musings on life and change.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naipaul writes that the title of his book is based on Chirico's 1911 painting which shows two muffled figures standing in a deserted street in what appears to be a port city. A ship's. mast can be seen in the background. Originally, he says he had intended to write a story set in classical times about a sea journey which ends in a dangerous city. In fact, what emerges in the book is the story of a journey of a traveler from Trinidad who ends up living in Wiltshire near Stonehenge, the journey that Naipaul took himself.

The book seems obviously autobiographical, but Naipaul has called it a "novel" for reasons that aren't clear. . Perhaps it refers the arbitrary decisions that a writer makes in deciding which choices to make. Any choice of words could of course be other words, and the perception that those words create could be other perceptions. Naipaul rents a cottage, apparently, to assure himself of a peaceful place to write. But the place takes on a life of its own and instead of being a backdrop becomes the story itself.

Naipaul sees himself as a "stranger" in his rented quarters, a "literary" stranger who observes the life around him, at first the vegetative and animal life on his long walks,. Increasingly he describes the lives of the people who live nearby, most having something to do with the old estate mansion on whose property he is living. They're ordinary people, but all are connected in one way or another with one of Naipaul's preoccupations, decay and death. While he is there, most live out their lives, either die or move away, and in the end that is what Naipaul does - move away.

At first Naipaul tends to be philosophical, thinking about the thousands of years that humans have inhabited this area, beginning with the ancient people who built the Stonehenge monuments, the Romans who came and went, and the hundreds and hundreds of years since that people have lived in this valley and scraped a living from the land.

Gradually, though, he concentrates more on specific individuals, beginning with Jack, a caretaker who carefully tends his garden, as if to ward off his decline. In fact, it is with a mention of Jack that Naipaul closes the book, writing, "It [Naipaul's stay in this location] showed me life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men, the grief and the glory. And that was when, faced with a real death, and with this new wonder about men, I laid aside my drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast about Jack and his garden."

Some of those "drafts and hesitations" have to do with Naipaul's own past, his coming from Trinidad to England in l950, determined to be a writer, but as yet uncertain as to what was to be teh real subject of his writing.. In the end, it is the ordinary people around him, Jack, Jack's successor, Pitton, Mt. and Mrs. Phillips, housekeepers for the semi-invalid landlord whom Naipaul only glimpses on several occasions, allowing him to form a purely imaginative picture, and Bray, a cab driver who serves as a kind of chorus, commenting cynically on the community.

All of these people, even if they don't realize it, are on a "journey" (the heading for one of the five sections of the book), as is Naipaul himself. A journey toward decay and death, yes, but at one point the narrator observes that new life always emerges from dead matter. How and in what form it takes is always a mystery, and the "enigma" of arrival always leads to another mystery, that of departure.

Naipaul's book, would no doubt exasperate some readers - it meanders, deliberately, I think, backtracks, talks about various lives only tangentially connected by place, but in the end it's a profound reflection on what living a life means.

[Pushan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Enigma of Arrival is a novel about how we deceive ourselves, consciously and unconsciously, to create a version of the world into which we can fit with the minimum of pain. It is also about how we cast illusions on the world, distorting it until it answers our personal and collective needs. In Trinidad, a man truncates the history of the island to understand his own place in it. In rural Wiltshire a business owner mentally denies his family history of servitude in order to accept his new vision of himself as a completely independent man. Naipaul himself, the controlling intelligence of this deeply autobiographical novel, shows how, arriving in London as a young man from Trinidad, he suppressed his racial, colonial shame in order to inhabit his idea of himself as a worldly, cosmopolitan writer.

This is a novel of ideas; but Naipaul resists abstraction, developing his argument through the painstaking accumulation of detail. Detail by detail, he takes apart all the unexamined clichés that combine to create the pastoral vision of the English countryside. The trees, the meadows, the agriculture and the people of the area: Naipaul makes them all seem as strange and contingent as something out of fiction. Slowly, circuitously, he reveals the completely provisional nature of everything we take for granted, everything we accept as ordained or ineluctable. He sees the fictions that governs the lives of men and women.

The tone of the novel is elegiac, and, as critics have said, often despairingly bleak. The decay of his patch of earth in Wiltshire; the frayed relationships of the people who have come to this rural landscape either by an accident of history or to live out some private need; the disappearance of the childhood life he knew in Trinidad - all are rendered in cool, lucid prose, like stones seen through clear water.

The charges that some critics have alleged against the novel are true: it is repetitive, it is concerned with the most minute and dry of details, it is almost without a plot. Everything seems to be floating: it would be difficult to pinpoint at what point in the book a certain event took place. It is the exact opposite of a page turner. Strange then that finishing The Enigma of Arrival, I felt much as I had felt when I read Naipaul's early Dickensian masterpiece, A House for Mr Biswas. The books could not be more different: Biswas is straight-forward, picaresque, satirical, profoundly touching. But I put down both books with the feeling that I had been immersed in a life lived out in its entirety.

Finally, the book - too close to real events to be fiction, too fragmented, too elliptical to be autobiography - is evidence that Naipaul is one of literature's great, unacknowledged experimenters. There is no other book like this.

[Lovmelovmycats Hart · Rating 2 out of 5]

So boring. It could have won the Pulitzer Prize for SO BORING if there was one.

[Home Faber]

* İnsanın kendisini görmesi, farkına varması ve en önemlisi ne olduğunun yada ne olmadığının, içindeki bilgeliğin farkına varması kanaatimce iki önemli şeyle mümkündür.Biri seyahat(yolculuk), diğeri ise yalnızlıktır. Özellikle seyahat insanın Maslow'un hiyeraşisinde en üstte bulunan kendini gerçekleştirme adımının en önemli noktalarından biri olarak görmekteyim.

** Mark Twain "Seyahat etmek, önyargı, bağnazlık ve dar kafalılık için ölümcüldür" der. Kitapta Giorgio de Chirico'nun Gelişin Bilmecesi adlı dizi tablosundan esinlenen eserde ana temada yolculuk ve bileşenleri üzerine genç bir Hintli'nin üzerine yoğunlaşmıştır. İçsel bir yolculuğu tümüyle yaşayan arka planda İngiliz sömürgeciliği, üçüncü dünya ülkelerinin durumu kalıcı ve önlenemez değişimler ele alınmış.

*** Ünlü sosyal bilimci, düşünür İbn Haldun'un en bilinen sözlerinden olan "Coğrafya kaderdir" sözüdür. Bu söz ile içinde yaşadığımız coğrafya ile sahip olduğu kaynaklar insan davranış ve koşulları bütünüyle etkilemesidir. Otobiyografik bu eserde Karayiplerden İngiltere'ye uzanan geniş bir yalnızlık ve yabancılaşma kahramanızı tümüyle etkisine alır. Okuyun...

[Arukiyomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once I’d settled into this, it was a beautiful read. Naipaul is a Nobel Laureate and so you expect that the prose will be challenging. But while A Bend in the River and In a Free State are more “psychologically challenging” as I said in my review of the latter, the challenge with Enigma is that is so very, very simple.

The prose is so measured and the descriptions so simple that you can be forgiven for getting bored until you grasp what Naipaul is doing. This is no accident. The prose perfectly fits the intent of the author. This is a book that is all about reflection, all about understanding the significance of the mundane and all about knowing where you have come from and where you currently are.

In using this construction, Naipaul allows us to read the novel on several different levels. The simplest approach (and the one a British expat in Saudi would most appreciate) is to read it as a beautifully descriptive eulogy to the British countryside. At the most complex level, this is probably beyond me. But there is something here for
every mature novel reader.

I say mature because so many readers these days expect novels to consist of a strong plot. This is not what you’re going to get here as Naipaul describes in detail the many years he lived in a small cottage on a Wiltshire estate. He also describes his emigration from Trinidad to study at Oxford. While plot is not necessary for a good novel, it does help that there are strong characters. These consist mostly of the inhabitants of the estate and all are crafted with care so that, like the reclusive Naipaul, you only get to know them as well as he did.

Along the way, he gives us a great deal of insight into the formative processes of a number of his early works. If you’ve read some of these, as I have, then you’ll find this interesting. If you haven’t, then you probably won’t. So, this is a book that should be read after you’ve completed a few of Naipaul’s key books.

As will all Naipaul that I’ve read so far, he is very good at capturing the issues faced by people who find themselves grappling with cultural identity. As I’ve spent more than half my life out of my passport culture, I very much relate to this. Enigma is known as a semi-autobiographical novel, but at times I felt like he was writing my biography!

For the patient, this book has a great deal to offer. It would probably benefit from a couple of readings actually. There’s a lot going on behind the simple prose and it is worth spending time taking it all in.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressive work of fiction that is some high percentage memoir of a writer’s life (obviously Naipaul's) in his adopted country. For a book with virtually no plot, just deep observation and precise, attentive description, it is amazingly absorbing reading.

Naipaul, by most, if not all accounts, is not a nice man, perhaps even by many measures a bad one, mean, self-absorbed, and cursed with a bully’s violent temper. None of that, however, is a factor, even much of a presence here. There are brief moments of indirect, cold, snobby judgments. But otherwise it is a book about a writer who lives at an observational remove, pursuing material for his art.

In this book, rare is the character who is identified as a friend. Most are neighbors and a few are acquaintances. Perhaps the fiction isn’t in what was included but what was left out—no wife, no lover, no visits from family. The book begins with him in Wiltshire, a country village within walking distance of Stonehenge. He is newly arrived and this splendidly written section is called “Jack’s Garden” and evolves into a meditation on how geography changes, absorbing human interaction with an appearance of permanence that regardless of its apparent staying power (a lifespan, a few generations, something more or often shockingly less) inevitably decays. Loss, mortality, and the foundation life rule that all is transitory is the elegy recited here.

“Jack’s Garden” is followed by a section called The Journey, a more straightforward memoir of the writer’s journey from Trinidad to England, from a schoolboy’s stereotype of a writer to a real one. The next two sections, “Ivy” and “Rooks” are a return to the examination of the changes in the one-time manor the author lives on, tracking the lives of the Phillips, the manor house caretakers, Bray, the car service driver and owner, Mr. Pitton, the manor gardener—people whose lives change color with the years as leaves do with the season and who, like leaves, over the years of Naipaul’s residence, pass on. Once fixtures on the land and mind -scape of the writer’s daily existence, then not.

The final section is his farewell, where his departure coincides with his sister’s death in Trinidad, bringing an extra emotional impact to this novel of life’s tragic beauty. Brilliantly written and completely fascinating.

[Mmars · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I were to read this book again, I would read the last section, The Ceremony of Farewell, first. Really. The narrator's summation helps the book as a whole make sense. For one thing, Naipaul establishes the hurried, unedited stream of consciousness style he uses. This is most evident in "Jack's Garden," the first section, and my favorite, of the book.

Here, Naipaul in his youthful naievete relates the circumstances that brought him to Wiltshire, England. But more so, in a sing-songing string of prose, he conjure up the nursery rhyme "This is the house that Jack built. " Fascinated me. Just as we often rethink our past, adding or subtracting details, so does Naipaul remember the countryside manor in which he establishes himself as a writer. I don't think the nursery rhyme connotation was accidental. The book was about life cycles. Mostly change, decay, and death. But also rebirth and opportunity. I decided to just go with his repetitive memories and read the first section like poetry.

The next section, the Journey, is the most autobiographical. Here Napiaul uses a painting, "The Enigma as Arrival," (which graces the cover) as metaphor for his life. Being an immigrant, stranger, outsider who can never return.

"Ivy" was the most difficult for me to read. Both because of style and content. It dragged. My mind wandered. As his landlord (the manor owner) ages and recedes inside the manor, the estate and its employees fall victim to inevitable decay, neglect, and loss. The changes of life. An interesting theme here was his observation of the common interechange of the words refuge and refuse. The metaphor for lives small and sequestered, lives wasted and thrown away. Not only that but it's written by an outsider, leaving the reader helpless.

And finally "Rooks," the birds who lose their homes when the elms die forcing them to other trees, serves to indicate survival is possible. But at what cost? Death is inevitable and it is this that drives the narrator to write his story.

I found the book to be both brilliant and frustrating, an ultimately unevenly written. I finished it, but it wasn't compelling, nor was it driven by plot. For serious readers only, and even then, I'd only recommend it to people who have read Naipaul and wish to dig deeper.

[Joana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Foi a primeira vez que li V. S. Naipul e acho que fiquei apaixonada por ele. Este livro insere-se na gaveta "Literatura de Viagem" no entanto é um livro um tanto complexo. Talvez tenha sido esta complexidade de o definir/classificar que me prendeu. Tem rasgos autobiográficos, tem rasgos de viagem, de ficção, de fragmentação e até de estilo diaristico. Mas nada disso importa, para ser sincera. É um livro muito bom, um livro sem definição, um livro que nos ensina que as gavetas são ficções e que só podemos viver uma vida plena quando ultrapassamos essas mesmas. Um livro que nos chama a atenção para o perigo de uma "educação abstracta" e de como isso pode trazer consequências.
Naipul tem uma escrita simples, verdadeira no entanto repleta de poesia, ritmo e entrelinhas. Um livro cheio de ironia, filosofia e até elementos cómicos que levam o leitor a pensar, a rir e a colocar-se na posição de Naipul. Muito bom!

[Katelis Viglas · Rating 1 out of 5]

I bought this book long ago before V.S. Naipoul earn the Nobel Price. The painting of the cover stuck me. The title shuits perfectly not with the context but with the painting. Such a cover and such a title were very suggestive. Unfortunately the context just was absent. Very good language, but without something really amazing.

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Over the course of five sections, The Enigma of Arrival draws an autobiographical portrait of an unnamed narrator that strongly resembles the author. Like Naipaul, the narrator is ethnically Hindu, raised in Trinidad, and schooled in England. He recounts his life on a decaying country estate near Salisbury, Wiltshire. Much of the novel focuses on the characters that populate the manor and the changes that it undergoes while the narrator lives there. This narrative is supplemented with recollections from the narrator's life as an immigrant and young writer.

The Enigma of Arrival finds Naipaul in a sentimental mood. While the narrator's voice retains much of the hardness that characterizes Naipaul's other works, it also demonstrates a wistfulness about the past and the setting in which the narrator presently finds himself in.

In thinking about Naipaul as a novelist, I frequently think of him as "tough." I use that word in two senses. First, he doesn't easily give himself up to scrutiny. I have not easily understood the personal-philosophical underpinnings. Second, Naipaul's fiction often takes a dim view towards its characters. It assesses them bleakly, even cruelly. Naipaul's clarity when dispensing his views towards the characters of his fiction differs dramatically from the worldview that informs his novels more broadly.

And yet, in The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul makes plain the thematic thrust of the novel. In describing the life of Jack, the central animating force of the novel, a man who lives, and soon dies, in a nearby cottage, and who tends to a garden that enchants the narrator, he writes, "All around him was ruin; and all around, in a deeper way, was change, and a reminder of the brevity of the cycles of growth and creation. But he had sensed that life and man were the true mysteries; and he had asserted the primacy of these with something like religion. The bravest and most religious thing about his life was his way of dying: the way he had asserted, at the very end, the primacy not of what was beyond life, but life itself" (93).

Naipaul digs into the theme of growth and creation by lushly describing the natural world in Salisbury: its seasonality, its bounty (epitomized by Pitton's garden), and the human artifacts that destabilize and pollute it. He also returns to a theme found in his other novels: the formative power of the world. Naipaul sees the individual as shaped by the world from which he emerges. Naipaul draws out the notion of differing worlds by sketching the distinctions between the New World, from which the narrator emigrates, and the Old World, where he currently finds himself. The narrator sees himself as an oddity in rural England because his formative world differs so greatly his present setting. He is "a man from another hemisphere, another background" (15).

In the world, to Naipaul, one must assert themselves. In his middle age the narrator thinks of death and is consumed with melancholy. He is so afflicted by this melancholy that he is "made so much not a doer (as men must be, every day of their lives)" (343). The parenthetical thought, a seeming throwaway line, is Naipaul's worldview in its essence. It is expressed at the beginning of A Bend in the River: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." Elsewhere in The Enigma of Arrival, the narrator laments a life that lacks self-assertion: "Her life had repeated; she had lived the same life or versions of the same life. Or, looking at it another way, almost as soon as it had begun, her life of choice and passion had ended" (78).

Unfortunately, the thematic richness and the richness of the prose is let down by poor pacing, a fact that becomes especially apparent in the last hundred pages. By Naipaul's own admission, during the composition of the book, he set "aside his drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast" (354). Sadly, it's not apparent that he edited the book with the same vigor. Still, this only slightly detracts from the better qualities of this meditative and essayistic novel.

[Scott · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Enigma of Arrival is an incredibly tedious book. On the surface, it sounds like it could be interesting: it's about the development of a writer and his experiences adjusting to life in England after growing up in Trinidad. But it is sooooooo dull. The first third of the book is all about the author walking around this rural English down and looking at the landscape. That's pretty much it. He sees people on his walks, but then remains firmly focused on the landscape. The second section describes the author's experience going from Trinidad to England - somewhat more interesting. But then the third section takes us right back to that English town! This time, though, a little bit more focused on characters, which was nice. But still - quite slow and dull. Another odd note about this book: the author repeats sentences. It's odd, and I can't quite figure out why they decided to do this. Anyway, it's a dull book.

[Yrinsyde · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strange novel, very hypnotising in parts. It is the first circular novel I've read - you can start reading from any chapter. In fact, the first and longest chapter is almost the wrong chapter to start reading this novel and when I read this novel again, I'll start at the second. The first chapter annoyed me a little because I was always trying to picture in my head where all the geographical features were in relation to the buildings. If only there was a map! In the end, I had to ignore my location thoughts and just read straight through. It is a very touching novel, about dissipation and degeneration. Trying to hang onto the past when the future is pushing it away from you ... this is what the author in the novel saw and experienced. The past is another country ...

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a really odd book. The style is likeable enough that I read the whole thing even though this would be a candidate for the most words ever written about next to nothing.

It's basically an autobiographical novel that focuses on the writer's existance in Salisbury, UK. He skips over the good parts.

The best part of it is a review on the back cover that: "like a computer game leads the reader on by a series of clues....." This is from 1987 so if you liked the Legend of Zelda or Mike Tyson's punchout, you'll love this maybe. Watch out for that piston punch, gotta dodge it in rhythm....

[Catarina Gomes · Rating 5 out of 5]

O mais autobiográfico dos romances de Naipaul, fala-nos do longo caminho que o escritor-personagem fez até descobrir qual era a sua matéria-prima de escrita. Chegado da periferia, envergonhado do seu percurso, tentou ser um escritor inglês, escrever como eles, sobre os seus temas, até ter descoberto que o seu "material" estava, afinal, no longo caminho que tinha percorrido até chegar ao centro do império britânico.

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Flat - that's the best word to describe how I felt while reading this book. It's unbelievably repetitious. I have nothing good to say about it

[Jesse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Zzzzzzzz...

[Jose Santos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Um livro que não me marcou e me desiludiu pois estava à espera de algo diferente. Li sem grande entusiasmo pela escrita nem pelo tema autobiográfico e introspectivo da vivência do autor em Inglaterra.

[James Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Enigma of Arrival is one of V. S. Naipaul's masterpieces. In this autobiographical novel he successfully conveys to the reader the atmosphere of the English countryside through the meditations of the narrator on his original journey from Trinidad to England. Through the mind of the narrator we experience the fictional reality of the world-a world of Naipaul's making. Echoes from both James Joyce and Marcel Proust are visible in the narration of the novel. This seems a quiet book, but it is a powerful one. The book is composed of five sections that reflect the growing familiarity and changing perceptions of Naipaul upon his arrival in various countries after leaving his native Trinidad and Tobago.
Most of the action of the novel takes place in England where Naipaul has rented a cottage in the countryside. The feeling of the place is palpable and the evocation of place is underlined by the physical effects and the history of the people and their artifacts. On first arriving, he sees the area surrounding his cottage as a frozen piece of history, unchanged for hundreds of years. However, as his stay at the cottage where he is working on another book becomes extended, he begins to see the area for what it is: a constantly changing place with ordinary people simply living lives away from the rest of the world. This causes Naipaul to reflect upon the nature of our perceptions of our surroundings and how much these perceptions are affected by our own preconceptions of a place.
As he re-examines his own emigration from Trinidad to New York, and his subsequent removal to England and Oxford Naipaul's narration illustrates the growing understanding of his place in this new environment and the intricate relations of the people and the land around them. The result is a magnificent read that is encouragement to savor other novels by this Nobel laureate author.

[Berna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Türkçe adı Gelişin Bilmecesi çev.Suat Ertüzün can yayınları
Adını Giorgio de Chirico'nun "enigma of arrival" isimli resminden alan bu kitap , 1845 lerde İngilizler tarafından Trinidad'a tarım işçiliği yapmaları için yerleştirilen Hintli göçmen bir aileye mensup yazarın , 1950'lerde yazar olmak için geldiği Londra'dan sonra 1970'lerde Salisbury'de yerleştiği eski bir malikane evine ait köy evinde geçirdiği yıllara ait otobiyografik bir roman. Ancak burda anlatılanlar yazarın kendi hikayesinden ziyade, yaşadığı yer, komşuları, malikane sahibi , mekanın geçirdiği değişiklikler ve bu küçük ayrıntıların kendisinde uyandırdığı duygu ve düşünceler. Sürükleyici bir hikayesi olmadığı için okurken sıkıldığınız ama bir yandan da okumayı bırakırsam bir dilin nasıl kullanıldığına, etrafımızdaki küçük detayların nasıl bir roman haline getirilebileceğine şahitlik etme fırsatını kaçıracağınızı hissettiren bir kitap.Edebiyata soyunmuş ve kendilerini yazar olarak adlandıran bazılarının , bu kitabı okuyarak, edebiyatın asli unsuru dilin efektif kullanımının nasıl olabileceğini irdelemelerini öneririm.Kitabı ana dili İngilizce olanların çok daha keyif alarak okuduklarını varsayıyorum.
Türkçe baskısında kitap kapağında, kitabın adını aldığı resmin değil de başka bir ressama ait farklı bir resmin kullanılmış olmasına hiç bir anlam veremedim.

[Nikoline · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The Enigma of Arrival" by V.S. Naipaul left me quite ambivalent, as the writing flows beautifully like a river, but it is also very seldom interrupted by dialogue which makes it, not difficult, but hard to read. It is not a book you read in one setting unless reading with your eyes closed counts. What I did not like about the writing was the way characters are described. Instead of showing and not telling, Naipaul does it the other way around which I do not approve of.

This is without doubt a book I only read because I read it for a course in longer novels, however, I did enjoy the writing as just mentioned. What I did not like was the lack of plot and the fact that the author's own arrogance is shining through his main character. "The Enigma of Arrival" is said to be a somewhat biography which might explains Naipaul's traits in the main character.

The first forty pages are the most difficult to through, but once you have overcome these it gets easier as you get to known the way the author writes and what the novel is about. It reminds me a lot of "Walden" by Thoreau which means I probably will not read it again any time soon.