The Enigma of Arrival

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.

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.

Deși Naipaul are un stil rafinat, cartea a ieșit incredibil de plictisitoare. Doar capitolul despre sosirea sa în Anglia cu intenția de a scrie suscită curiozitatea - tendința (demascată acum) de a substitui realității închipuirile sale despre omul-scriitor.

În celelalte capitole, autorul oarecum se contrazice, ascunzându-se în spatele unor personaje minore pe care le amplifică forțat până la niște dimensiuni epice. Dacă intenția a fost să demonstreze că până și din zborul buburuzei se poate face un roman dacă ești atent la detalii, ei bine, în așa caz, a reușit (reducându-și "biografia" la experiența ochiului care observă).

This was a tough book to read. I couldn't get through the first few chapters even though Naipaul has been one of my favourite writers in English. Writers when they become well recognised, try to use their authority to write experimental works. For Naipaul, it was this book and 'A way in the world'. Said to be an auto-biographical Novel, it concerns two periods of Naipaul's life: His arrival in London as an young aspiring writer and his arrival in a small agricultural town in England as an old, world weary established writer.

The novel takes us through this process of seeing the new places and people and making sense of them. It is slow and often very deliberate book. I liked the parts that are about Naipaul himself rather than his observations of pastoral life in England. The power of the prose is intact, but some might find this either pointless or vain.

I was in college when Naipaul won the Nobel in 2001. I diligently picked up a few of his non-fiction works which surprisingly are still fresh in my memory – his fascination with filth and squalor could be one of the reasons.

‘The Enigma of Arrival’ is much different from his other works. I don’t agree with the fiction classification of this work as its heavily auto biographical. The first section of the work was a masterclass on observation of a countryside and juxtaposing it with ruminations on birth and death. The middle section which dealt with his own abrupt migration from Trinidad to the UK in the 1950s was the most riveting piece. His first flight journey, memories of his first night in a big city (The Big Apple in this case), piecing together his first night in a hotel and his slow settling into the city made for some poignant reading.

Through a series of shorter stories, Naipaul relates sections of his life with the English countryside as the backdrop. They are all tied together, and could very well have been one longer cohesive novel, in my opinion, but he chose to separate them into smaller sections.

This is a slow book- contemplative and thoughtful. Not plodding. Through repetition (which I questioned at first), the atmosphere is realized as integral to the rest of the stories being told. It's as though we're living in Naipaul's thoughts, in those moments of reminder- "here's what this brought up for me again". This is not a character-driven narrative, and as such, I needed to be in the right space to truly appreciate the book.

Food: cream tea with just a hint of sugar. Smooth, warming, best on a cool, rainy day overlooking a beautiful, quiet view.

"No one is born a rebel. Rebellion is something we have to be trained in."

This book surfs through various aspects of the author's life and his journey (should be read as Evolution) from being an amateur to one adept in the art of writing.

The book might be burdensome at times for the overstretched portrayal of certain instances. But nevertheless it keeps the reader captivated. It traverses to and fro the span of a few decades and the experiences of the author throughout. It touches upon various aspects of human life with special reference to the learnings that go with the age. The acceptance, the liberation, the mindfulness, the dichotomy, the process of life itself, the weathering of emotions with the passage of time, and more lie at the core of this autobiography.

Another important and outstanding part of this autobiographical narrative lies in the fact that it is not filled with tragic or sophisticated details of one's life but encompasses only experiences and their impact on the overall psyche en route. It is this experience that one might find burdensome, but it is also this experience that solicits attention. Because, in that then, one does not feel information fed but is only experience-fed which is easily relatable.

A book that might help make one, a lot more sense of the happenings around!

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.