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.

From Publishers Weekly

Discursive and ruminative, more like an extended essay than a novel, the intricately structured chapters in this highly autobiographical book reveal "the writer defined by his . . . ways of seeing." Naipaul, in his own person, narrates a series of events, beginning during a period of soul-healing in Wiltshire, circling back to the day of his departure from Trinidad in 1950 when he was 18, describing his time in London before he went up to Oxford, moving back to Trinidad after his sister's death: these journeys are a metaphor for his life. With beautiful use of detail recaptured from an extraordinary memory, with exquisitely nuanced observations of the natural world and his own interior landscape, he shows how experience is transmogrified after much incertitude and paininto literature. This is a melancholy book, the testament of a man who has stoically willed himself to endure disappointment, alienation, change and grief. Naipaul lays bare the loneliness, vulnerability and anxieties of his life, the sensibility that is both an asset for the writer and a burden for the man. He demonstrates this brilliantly by describing other peoplemainly his neighbors in a village near Stonehenge. Using these characters as catalysts, Naipaul peels back protective layers of memory, sparing himself nothing, revealing the mistakes and inadequacies of his life. The drama resides in small incidents: the death of a cottager, the firing of an estate's gardener; with each account, the narrative is spun more tightly into a seamless tapestry, a powerful document by a master of his craft. Readers Subscription Book Club main selection.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"An elegant memoir, a subtly incisive self-reckoning." ?_Washington Post Book World_

"Far and away the most curious novel I've read in a long time, and maybe the most hypnotic book I've ever read." ?_St. Petersburg Times_

"The conclusion is both heart-breaking and bracing: the only antidote to destruction ? of dreams, of reality ? is remembering. As eloquently as anyone now writing, Naipaul remembers." ?_Time_

"V.S. Naipaul is a man who can inspire readers to follow him through the Slough of Despond and beyond? Like a computer game [this book] leads the reader on by a series of clues, nearer and nearer to an understanding of the man and the writer. Few memoirs can claim as much." ?_Newsday_ -- Review

Starts off weirdly boring for 100 pages (!) then it gets really good.

I will admit that I found this book hard going at first, but after about the first 60 pages, I began to recognize the significance of Naipaul's descriptions throughout The Enigma of Arrival. His prose are poignent and even his slightest descriptions carry metaphorical weight.

Near the end of the novel, he writes:

"Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memories" (301).

I think that this excerpt captures the kind of shifting and reflective landscape that Naipaul illustrates throughout this novel.

Another aspect of The Enigma of Arrival that I really appreciate was how Naipaul reveals the initial disparity between himself as a writer and a human being, but then begins to sew these two versions of himself together. Not only does Naipaul write "to get anywhere in the writing, I had first of all to define myself very clearly to myself," but he also demonstrates the transition from a disjointed self to self-discovery through the prose themselves (leaning less on 'traditional' canonical allusions and more on his own intuition and understanding as the book goes on).

I hate to admit, but it took my having read four/fifths of the book before I "got it." I picked it up because I had read of the demise of the author in August and felt drawn to honor his life dedicated to the written word by reading one of his books. I was, frankly, utterly bored, and so amazed myself by an apparent commitment to trudging through page after page. Besides being useful as a cure for insomnia, I kept wondering when was the story going get going? I'd think, the guy won the Nobel, what am I missing? And so I would read another page. I did not realize I was reading a memoir until almost having completed it, but memoir it is. And I finally got it. It's memoir of the process of growing burgeoning changing diminishing conscious awareness, a delectably deep and intelligent exploration of the mystery of life as we live it, one tiny pearlescent moment strung after another, only to decay die rot and be washed away. Quite beautiful, if you can bear it...

The Enigma of Arrival is about the ephemerality of context. Naipaul’s awareness and maturity grows over the course of his mostly autobiographical musings on change, aging and death as he observes life like a crow circling a field on an updraft, always higher, seeing the same things again and again but with the awareness of his previous self below.

It’s like Thomas Bernhard without the cynicism, humor or irony, and that’s a good thing, but it does feel depressing at times without them. The story would bore me were it not so splendidly written. The book stands on passage after passage of brilliant writing.

My first Naipaul, looking forward to reading more. I marked this one up quite a lot and will probably reread it.

4.5

I love Naipaul's writing, definitely want to try some more. The short sentences, the exclamation marks, the revelations in parenthesis, the many sentences starting with 'And' and 'But'. Language so simple but powerful and precise. Really interesting on colonialism and British culture. My favourite aspect of this book was the way it was about a writer and the process of seeing the world. As the narrator puts it towards the end, 'The story had 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'.

If you like Tarkovsky movies, this book is for you.
Remember the promo for Discovery Channel (or was it National Geographic?) when a guy stopped to observe a snail in a busy train station? Imagine something like this, but alongside 400 pages.
I used to love Naipaul, having discovered ‘Beyond Belief’ in an airport somewhere on this planet, more than 10 years ago. Then I bought ‘Among the Believers’, of which ‘Beyond Belief’ is a sequel. Then ‘An Area of Darkness’. Then…
Then I discovered that, although he was a Nobel Prize winner and a literature genius, his own morality lacked. Or at least had big holes in it. Does being a genius with words excuses the horrible behavior towards the women in his life? Or the pitiful, superior regards versus his homeland/s (Trinidad and India)? Towards page 300, I could not read ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ anymore. Because of getting bored (despite the acuity of his observations and his descriptions) but moreover because I was haunted by the personal-professional clivage that Naipaul now represents for me. Most probably, hating something in others is an expression of not being able to make peace with oneself. But still…
His biographer (Patrick French), if memory serves me well, has said that Naipaul (due to his origins) speaks of the ‘third world’ as white people would openly speak if they had the courage to do so. A dark skinned imperialist, Naipaul is a man of contrasts, whose books (most of them, probably not ‘An Enigma of Arrival’, at least not in its entirety) will have made a better memory of him than the flesh & blood man he has been.

Impeccably written - so poetic - found beauty in the mundane. A little slow paced in the second half as it was an autobiographical account so looking forward to reading one of his novels next. A very good read for a book picked up from a box on a Melbourne drive way

To tell the truth, I'm extremely torn about this book. On the one hand – or from one perspective, certainly – it is a masterpiece: the prose is simply immaculate, the writing is vastly insightful, profound, emotional and observant enough to summon an environment that feels more real than the one that I am currently sitting in. On the other hand, however, there is no way of denying that it is also vastly self-indulgent. Here, you have 400 pages of a contemplations by a successful writer who moved to the English countryside for artistic inspiration about what it feels like to be a successful writer who moves to the English countryside for artistic inspiration. There is little to no story to speak of, and the supporting cast of villagers, whoever brilliantly they may be portrayed, is drowned out by Naipaul himself, from whom they essentially become props in a journey of privileged self-discovery. You will get dozens of pages worth of descriptions of walking past willows and watching birds nest in the trees, and of what villagers' choice of clothing reveals about their small minded aspirations. All of these descriptions are masterfully done, but there is barely anything besides, nothing that really reveals why anyone but Naipaul himself would have needed this book to be written. I guess if you're either an aspiring writer hoping to study the technical aspects of craft, or someone who's deeply nostalgic about British ruralness half a century ago, you will greatly appreciate "The Enigma of Arrival". However, for anyone who is not, I could come up with dozens of titles on the spot that are more deserving of your time and effort.

One of my least favorite things to read in novels is descriptions of nature and landscapes. This book is nearly 400 pages of descriptions of nature and landscapes and little else. My other least favorite thing to read in novels is vague descriptions of settings that make it difficult to picture in my head. Not only is this novel composed mostly of descriptions of a setting, but the setting is described in a deliberately disorienting way, so it's impossible to figure out where things are in relation to other things. I also hate repetition, and this is a novel in which these descriptions of nature and landscapes are repeated over and over again, coming across like the delirious rantings of a senile old man lost in his memories. Perhaps that was the intention, but Naipaul was not a skilled enough writer to make it interesting. Instead, it comes off as self-indulgent navel-gazing from an abusive monster (I normally try to separate the art from the artist, but when the artist puts himself in his work, it's hard to do this).

Not quite a novel, it's a type of memoir, which comprises travel as a theme though it is set in one place. It is really about how travel changes those that move, whether emigrants or the permanently restless. Set in an English county, Naipaul is perspicacious to a great degree, the writing is acute, sometimes cruel, but nearly always accurate about people and place. A stimulating read.