Naipaul is more interesting when he describes landscapes than when he describes people. He's at his best when he thinks about the different layers of time present in the English landscape. As far as people are concerned, unfortunately, only petty squabbles and human weaknesses seem to interest him.
I was also expecting more direct attention to the story of how Naipaul became a writer.

Lengthy descriptions of landscape features and foliage seen on walks make this novel tough sledding. The author reflects on his life and the lives of the workers housed near the grounds of the manor where he is renting a cottage. Those reflections become interesting at many points. But a thoughtful book without much narrative drive can be hard to get through, and this one was difficult for me in spite of its virtues. The notion that the author was fortunate to be able to observe, over many seasons, the once minutely tended grounds of the manor as it fell into disuse may stick with me. Perhaps some insights into the lives of displaced people and working people generally as well.

V.S. Naipaul has earned an enormous amount of bias from me, but even if that was not the case and I had never read anything by him before, this book would inspire me to find everything else he has written and read it. I have always been particularly drawn to his unique insight on people and the world and his biting tone throughout his works of both fiction and non-fiction, but it is through The Enigma of Arrival that I have a better understanding of Naipaul's process and his journey to identifying his voice.

A meandering, recursive (repetitive) book that was a worthy audiobook listen. As the book wound down, I felt like I was listening to a long-standing resident of a British village recounting local gossip. Were it not for the constant re-visiting of characters and their quirks and changing stories, this would be tedious. But it is not. The human condition is on display as is the various eyes of the various beholders. This is so much more than listening to an old-timer recounting key events in rural life. The author also threads his own autobiography throughout and relates them to the village characters and gossip.

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.

This is one of those books I could not read quickly. Not because it's extremely intricate, difficult to grasp - it was not a challenge by any standards. Not because it's outstandingly beautiful, hard to let go of - it was to me just the average novel.

The thing is, the story moves slowly, the pace matches the change of seasons, the succession of years //:o) .... and I wanted to adjust (and read it as slowly as itself it moves).

I personally disagree with what the author himself says in the end of the book, that he did separate himself (as a person) from the writer. I found his best lines the reflections re: nature, the cycle of life; and so, I would have liked to see more of this contemplative, impersonal side. He probably tried his best to dissociate himself - as a person - from the reporting ... but the choice of replicas, the choice of the feedback from the different characters, point in fact out his personal opinions and views.

I found Naipaul at his best when he indeed manages to forget himself, his roots. That is when he manages to write beautifully on the valley's natural surroundings, on British countryside - as it is in the second half of the XXth Century - and on time passing.

When he wants to be a jack of all trades, the Indian/Trinidadian/British (all in one) "know it all", then "bazaar style" literature comes to the fore - that I did not like.

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.
t
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.
t
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.
t
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.
t
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."
t
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.
t
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.
t
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.

In this fictionalized memoir, an author leaves his home on the Island of Trinidad to attend university in England and to become a writer. He starts out as many young people do, assuming that as a teenager he knows all he needs to know to judge the world and the people around him, and to write profound things from the wealth of his understanding. The novel is centered not around this younger man, but on his middle-aged self living in a cottage on the grounds of an English manor that is so far still mostly intact, but is showing signs of the financial strain and social pressure that often break up these large estates. The author at first settles into the nice illusion that the English countryside around him is timeless, but after a while he begins to recognize how artificially constructed or at least temporary the countryside he appreciates really is. Things in fact change rather constantly, and in sometimes drastic ways, and it is only because he and some of those around him stay put that they can recognize the constant flux around them. And, perhaps than, the author is also not as permanent and unchanging as he feels himself to be.
I got a bit bogged down midway in this book, but overall I did enjoy this one, and I certainly found the themes satisfying- gardening, the ways people and communities change over time, and how orderly spaces decay over time and are sometimes reinvented by new people once these spaces lose the value they once held in their earlier states.

Though largely short on plot or any point of interest, The Enigma of Arrival nonetheless showcases Naipaul's incredible mastery of language. With painstaking detail he describes the landscape and the characters of the depopulated English countryside, as well as his own egocentric meditations on everything he encounters. Though a difficult read, devoid of intrigue or action, might be worth going through if you are interested in observing Naipaul's skillful prose.

This book requires patience and literary background but it's worth the effort. I wish I could review it as well as I do in my dreams :) I love the layering and the subtleness of the narrative, and the underlying sadness. I thought the use of repetition was good and done for a good reason. Character description is so detailed you can see the person in your mind's eye--not literally so much but as a cartoonist might portray them and make a certain element prominent. Every country changes and people change along with it as he writes about the old cottage in one passage. It's like trying to hold a wave on the beach--it can't be done, time moves on. It's what we do along the way that counts and that is what he is writing about.

The first chapter was (apart from the descriptions of Jack) quite bad. No plot and yes misogyny. Probably would have rated this 2 stars if it had continued like that. Things got somewhat better in the 2nd chapter when he described his move from Trinidad to Britain and then much better in the 3rd & 4th chapters where he really went into depth with the character descriptions of the people who live in rural England. Thoroughly enjoyed the 2nd half, did not really enjoy the 1st. But the 2nd half was rly good so overall it's 4 stars for me.

Naipaul is the goat - read him and weep.