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.

Classified as fiction and subtitled "a novel in five sections," but this book reads like a memoir of a writer born in Trinidad, learning about literature, film, and cosmopolitan life only through books at first, educated at Oxford and spending many years in England. For me, this was a slow read, but I didn't want to stop. There are a lot of incidents repeated in and among the first four sections (the last section is very short and discusses how the book came to be written), in fact repeated word for word at times, the same descriptions of the same places. Most of the book is set when the narrator lives in a cottage on a manor farm --a farm that's seen better days -- in the county of Wiltshire, near Stonehenge, which is a healing place for him, though the second section, "The Journey," describes the narrator's travels by plane and ship from Trinidad to Jamaica to New York City to Earl's Court in London, and then his life at a post-war rooming house in Earl's Court before he starts college at Oxford.  A couple of themes throughout include the idea of change and decay/death and the nuanced gradations of class and status among people and places: "I had lived, very soon after coming to the valley, with the idea of change, of the imminent dissolution of the perfection I had found.  It had given a poignancy to the beauty I had experienced, the passing of the seasons. I had thought that because of my insecure past -- peasant India, colonial Trinidad, my own family circumstances, the colonial smallness that didn't consort with the grandeur of my ambition, my uprooting of myself for a writing career, my coming to England with so little, and the very little I still had to fall back on -- I had thought that because of this, I had been given an especially tender or raw sense of an unaccommodating world. ... I had trained myself to the idea of change, to avoid grief; not to see decay. It has been necessary, because the setting of this second life had begun to change almost as a soon as I had awakened to its benignity." A dreamy sort of book, very rooted in place, exploring the subtlety of thought, emotion, relationships.

A view of the English countryside and its inhabitants through the eyes of a recent immigrant from Trinidad. It reads like a memoir and yet claims to be a novel. I had no idea where the fiction begins and ends. Naipaul moved to England to pursue his education as a writer at Oxford University and much of this novel(?) discusses the life of a burgeoning writer and his struggle to find his "material". I enjoyed that aspect the most. Unfortunately, there was a little too much about gardening for me to truly love it.

“Dia após dia, avançava pelo amplo caminho cheio de ervas – talvez, em tempos remotos, uma via processional. Dia após dia, subia do fundo do vale até ao ponto culminante do itinerário, de onde se tinha uma vista magnífica de Stonehenge: os círculos de pedra diante dos meus olhos, em baixo, mas ainda longe: cinzento contra verde, e, por vezes, iluminados pelo sol. Naquele caminho gramíneo (mesmo estando disposto a admitir que a verdadeira via processional podia ficar noutro sítio), nunca deixava de me imaginar como um homem desses tempos remotos, um homem que subia em busca da confirmação de que tudo estava bem no mundo.”

“Aqui estava um mundo que não mudava – teria por certo pensado um forasteiro. Foi o que me pareceu quando comecei a descobri-lo: a vida no campo, o lento desenrolar do tempo, a vida inerte, a vida privada, a vida vivida em casas que se fechavam umas às outras.
Porém, esta ideia de uma vida que não mudava era falsa. A mudança era constante. As pessoas morriam; as pessoas envelheciam; as pessoas mudavam de casa; as casas eram postas à venda. A minha própria presença no vale, na casa rústica pertencente à grande propriedade, era um aspeto de uma outra forma de mudança. A cerca de arame farpado no trecho reto do grande caminho também era uma mudança. Todos os seres envelhecem; todas as coisas estavam a ser renovadas ou descartadas.”

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.

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.

Named after a surrealist painting, V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival focuses on time and place as characters instead of people. Seemingly autobiographical, a writer of Indian descent from Trinidad settles in a cottage on an English state. The lush sentences of the first part describe the unnamed first-person narrator's impressions of the estate and an estate worker named Jack. Other parts delve more into the narrator's coming to England before circling back to the estate and more of its people. While the language is lovely, I kept thinking this book should have been half as long. What the narrator describes as his immature search for material and the distance between his book learning and understanding of the world pervades, even though he claims to have moved past it. We do not really see his emotions, his interacting with the world, only what he tells us after being processed through a prism of rationality and even-toned language. Nevertheless, I am glad that the list of 1001 books you must read before you die has led me to this work by a Nobel laureate who passed away this year. RIP Sir V.S. Naipaul.

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.

En 1950, un adolescent d'origine hindoue quitte les Caraïbes pour devenir écrivain en Angleterre.

Trente années plus tard, V.S. Naipaul, auteur consacré, se retire à la campagne et tente de faire le point sur son oeuvre, sur lui-même, sur son pays d'adoption.

Avec l'implacable lucidité qui le caractérise, il évalue les dégâts du "progrès", mais aussi les promesses que l'avenir dessine.

S'il célèbre et regrette un certain art de vivre, il se garde de condamner celui qui lui succédera.

Depuis son modeste observatoire du Wiltshire, il observe la crise permanente des civilisations, tirant de tant de bruits et de fureur, un livre d'une exemplaire sagesse.

Immersively descriptive and visceral autobiographical fiction.

Zzzzzzzz...

This semi autobiographical, travel journal, historical, social commentary, how to write a novel book. V.S.Naipaul creates a story that does all of the above. The main character is a young man from Trinidad who decides he will be a writer and he goes to England to become this author.

Structure: Book in 5 parts but it is not linear. It loops from place to place, past to present, present to future. As a reader I found myself having thoughts of "have we been here before? Did I lose my place because this all seems familiar. It is somewhat disorienting. The novel is named after the the art work of Giorgio de Chirico. The scene is of a cityscape but behind the wall is unknown but we see an old ship mast and in front of the wall there are 2 alienated figures. One figure is going and the other is coming. It is rather bleak picture and Naipaul references this picture.

Themes are the journal, arrival, dislocation and alienation. Another theme is change. Over all it was enjoyable but not engaging. I can appreciate the quality of the work. Naipaul is truly a great author deserving of accolades.

another interesting tidbit; the landlord is modeled after Stephen Tennat (1906 to 1987), a 1920s socialite. He also is used as model in E. Waugh's novels, Cedric Hampton in Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford.