Customer Reviews

The Enigma of Arrival

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'll admit that I was really puzzled by this book when I started reading it. Very little happens. There is not much of a plot, at least as we usually think of it. I found myself wondering things like "what is he writing about" and "where is he going with all this detailed description?" The title aside, the book itself seemed like an enigma.

But after a while I began to get almost hypnotized by the narrative. And two things in particular really captured my attention. First, the very precise and painstaking psychological (and even behavioral) analysis of the characters in the book. To a great extent it reminded me of the level of detail that Dostoyevsky would go to in his psychological examinations of his characters. Second, the almost zen-like mindfulness of his description of setting. I was really astonished by the scope of the writer's attention, and his skill at simply noticing and describing ordinary things in a really extraordinary way.

So - no "action", not much plot, excruciatingly dull if you're looking for a thrill-a-minute page turner. However, if you can let yourself sort of mimic the mindset of the author and just go with it a bit, I think you'll find this to be a pretty amazing book.

This gorgeous book, a memoir and novel intermingled, is one of the strangest and most hypmotic I have ever read. V.S. Naipaul is known, unfairly, almost exclusively as a political and travel writer; few critics seem to have noted the extraordinary beauty and intelligence of his work or its profoundly personal, philosophical underpinnings. Here Naipaul, with no exotic backdrop or apalling human decline to reflect upon, comes out of the dark shadows and reveals himself as a kind of ascetic Proust. In spare, deeply controlled prose, he writes of his walks through the English countryside where he lives, and what he sees. While Naipaul is falling in love, late in life, with his adopted home, it is becoming disfigured by time and change, and soon what he loved is lost. His attempts to cope with that change, to avoid grief, to see coldly and without sentiment, shape the book. The overall effect is, in fact, much like that of Proust, but maybe wiser and certainly less indulgent. But it demands patience and reflection (Naipaul's thick-headed protege Paul Theroux didn't get it), so be warned.

Without question this is a strange book. It has no real plot, the arrangement of its sections is odd and their relationship to each other somewhat mysterious, and the attention to detail can be maddening. When I first attempted to read this book some years ago, I had to stop part of the way through, as I couldn't understand what was going on or why Naipaul had written this.

Fortunately I tried again not long afterwards; Naipaul is one of my favorite writers and I figured anything he wrote was worth at least a second try. The second time round I read much more slowly than the first time, trying to savor the precision of the prose and enter into the narrative more fully. The book's effect on me was dramatically different as a result. I became absorbed in the reading ("hypnotic" is how one review I read aptly described the prose), and I began to see the book's underlying themes: the existentialist need to make one's own place in the world in the face of decay and death, the power of art to transform experience and fight oblivion, how the writer sees and knows the world. Naipaul develops these themes slowly and subtly; they are woven deeply into the narrative, and can be easy to miss for that reason. But once you begin to see them, reading this beautiful book can be a profound and moving experience.

And so, despite the strangeness and the hard, slow reading this book requires, I would tell people that it is so worth the effort of careful study. Naipaul has written no ordinary novel here, but something rare and beautiful. A truly great book.

The title of "The Enigma of Arrival" is borrowed from a mysterious, haunting picture by Giorgio de Chirico, and the novel is as enigmatic as the painting from which it takes its name. It is not a conventional novel; in many ways its tone is closer to that of an autobiography than to that of a work of fiction. The narrator, like Naipaul himself, is a Trinidadian of Indian ancestry who arrived in Britain in the early fifties to study English at Oxford University and with an ambition to become a writer. The greater part of the work is taken up with a description of three years spent by the narrator living in a cottage in a small village in Wiltshire, probably during the seventies.

There is no plot in the normal sense of the word, and little in the way of characterisation, although Naipaul does give sketches of some of the individuals he came to know during his time in the village. The most impressive aspect of the book is Naipaul's descriptions of his country walks, giving detailed accounts of the downland, farmland and water-meadows of Wiltshire in beautifully descriptive prose. Being a keen country walker myself, I marvelled at the author's powers not only of description but also of observation, as he brings the English countryside in all its moods to life with a vividness to rival such masters of descriptive writing as Thomas Hardy and H.E. Bates. There is also a strong sense of England's historic past. Unlike some of those who have reviewed the book, I did not find these accounts boring. The book is slow moving, certainly, but that is not, in this case, a fault; it is a book to be read slowly, to linger over.

The overall tone of the book is one of melancholy and disenchantment. Naipaul's aim in his descriptions of the countryside is not simply to celebrate its beauty. He frequently describes it in its more sombre moods; many of his walks seem to take place on cold or overcast days. He has a good eye for prosaic details- barbed wire, derelict buildings, farm machinery. A theme that runs throughout is that of exile. The narrator (who is clearly intended to be identified with Naipaul himself) is, in a sense, a double exile. For all his love of the countryside, he is an outsider in England, a voluntary exile from the land where he was born. He feels like an exile in Trinidad, however, aware that his family are exiled from India, their ancestral homeland.

In an sense, many of the English people whom the narrator meets are also exiles, although not, of course, in a geographical sense. They are exiles in the sense that they find themselves alienated or left behind by social change, like the narrator's landlord, an aristocratic figure from a once wealthy family which has come down in the world. The less wealthy among the villagers also find themselves affected by the changing social order, and many of them are unhappy, dissatisfied or disaffected.

Perhaps my main criticism of "The Enigma of Arrival" would be one originally made by Salman Rushdie, namely that it is "devoid of either passion or love". The narrator is as disillusioned as any of those people about whom he writes, perhaps more so, without any room for enthusiasm or joy in his life. He appears to be a childless bachelor, without any romantic attachments or even close friendships. The result is a bleak book, but still a fascinating one. One to be read in winter.

This book describes the feeling of being thrown into a society that one does not belong to, where it's impossible to belong because , first, the past (the writer's old culture) has been disconnected from him, and, second, in the modern society the external circumstances change too fast and unpleasantly for the mind and soul to adapt.

The book is about a fragment of modern English-speaking society, seen from the perspective of an acute observer from a wildly different culture. The observer's original culture was destroyed by immigration, and he tries to interpret fragments of it from his childhood, like the meaning of sweeping the dirt outside the house each morning. From a related perspective, one can also read Spengler's 'Decline of the West', and John Berger's Pig Earth.

I picked up this book and began reading it at a friend's weekend house and couldn't stop. So, I bought my own copy. That was thirteen years ago. This remains one of my favorite books, in memory. The haiunting cover piece, from a painting by de Chirico, fits the message very well.

In this book, Naipaul goes far beyond the bawdy comedy and drastic character-sketches that characterize his other, easier works. The book combines three stories. The arrival in Britain, the life of a writer; wryly written insights. The very subtle experience of (an immigrant's) belonging and loss in a remote cottage in the English countryside; some of the finest writing ever. Finally, interlaced with this, fictionalized-historical accounts of the colonization of the Carribean -- full of black humor and anger; which makes a drastic and colorful contrast to the personal, quietly written, day-by-day experience of rural England. Together, this book is a departure for Naipaul (I think), in the same way that (in another genre) Stardust Memories was for Woody Allen. It is less a book about a colorful colonial society or person; it is about what it means to be an immigrant to (the reader's) country, nature, land; the symbols which to an individual, mean loss; how to experience loss. An amazing book.

I failed to engage with this book at all on my first attempt.A few years later, I read it in a few days.
The prose is plaintively beautiful, precise and often neutral.The emotions and 'story' controlled by the prose are almost unbearably painful.

I am astonished by what V.S Naipaul achieved in this book.

I would never have picked up this book -- not my usual genre. However, my book group in Tucson chose the selection so I dutifully read the whole thing as carefully as possible.

You cannot read this book for plot. There is no plot. You can't read for character. All characters are viewed through the eyes of the narrator, a thoroughly unlikeable man who has come to the country to write and to heal himself from other writing disasters.

The book can be intensely frustrating. The narrator lives in his own head. I've known others like him -- people who respond to every person and place intellectually. Unlike an anthropologist, he is not trying to understand the culture of those he meets. Rather each individual is put under the narrator's verbal microscope, dissected on the basis of external appearance. We learn that a gardener always dresses up formally and changes clothes with seasons -- but we do not know why. We observe the comings and goings of the village people and the narrator's landlord -- but we do not understand their hearts, minds or motives.

The narrator's distance ultimately comes across as hostile superiority. He does not belong here in this house in the country and he knows he will never fit in. Yet he never allows himself to have a genuine reaction to what he experiences. His encounter with the English countryside is filtered through the writers and artists he knows: Wordsworth, Constable, and more.

Amazingly, we keep turning the pages. Naipul violates every rule of writing. He tells rather than shows. He does not build suspense. The characters do not evoke sympathy. Yet Naipul's command of language keep the reader turning the pages, even when he launches into long descriptions of country places.
It's about language, not plot.

The ending of the book yields the greatest insight. We realize the narrator has become a man without a country, at home nowhere. He sees his own rituals through the eyes of a stranger. It is sad and, perhaps, inevitable. But in the end I, as a reader, was as detached from the narrator as he was from his own environment.

I feel the need, firstly, to defend myself against skeptics, who might suppose I am a shallow reader who traipses blithely between the latest "beach read" and the -- for the most part -- pulpy bestseller lists. I do not shy away from challenging or deeply psychological novels, and I have enjoyed various demanding works of literature, ranging from Proust to Pynchon. And rarely do I encounter a book that I do not finish (unpleasant as it might be) because the scrupulous superego within me scolds that it is unfair and presumptuous to judge a book either by its cover or by its first half alone. (There. That's my admittedly defensive preamble to the following.)

Then, along came V.S. Naipaul's THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL, which caused even the aforementioned superego to chuck this work, without qualm or compunction, into the discard pile. ENIGMA is a mercilessly dull and self-indulgent work of semi-fiction concerning the narrator's feeling of detachment from the foreign locales in which he finds himself -- the very seemingly idyllic locales that he imagined as a youngster in Trinidad.

Let me digress slightly for a moment: When I was younger, I refused to swallow aspirin, so my mother would smash up a few tablets in a teaspoon with sugar and water so that it was a degree less foul-tasting. (Thank you, Mom.) But nevertheless the taste of the aspirin, chalky and sharp, was gag-inducing. That particular taste, if fully translatable by whatever means into the nomenclature of literature and the appreciation thereof, would be synonymous with the experience of reading this book.

Yes, I agree. There is, must be, and will continue to be an audience out there for this novel, as evidenced at least by Naipaul's having won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I do not doubt for one moment that there are some readers (who probably consider themselves more discriminating than I) for whom ENIGMA will hold a special place, maybe even at the top of their Best-Of lists, but I feel confident in saying that audience is limited. Extremely limited... to readers who enjoy page after page after page after self-flagellating, mind-numbing, suicidal-making page of description of the English countryside. As if his descriptions are not thorough enough, Naipaul repeats them -- like some kind of pastoral rerun -- redescribing gardens, redescribing quaint cottages, redescribing paths through the woods. It's really enough to make one's internal voice scream, "Enough already, man! Get on with it!" ...to which an admirer of ENIGMA will protest that he was getting on with "it" -- it being some ruminative, high-fallutin' exploration of memory and one's surroundings. And that's fine, but I could do with a little less rumination. Rumination has its limits, as any good ruminator knows, and Mr. Naipaul should hightail it ASAP to Ruminators Anonymous.

To add insult to injury, not only does the narrator go on and on, boring even the most indulgent reader in submission, he is also not a very likable "character" (that is, if the character is not Naipaul himself). He is aloof, snobby, and very self-important -- not at all someone with whom you'd like to spend 200+ pages, even if he had something interesting to say.

Why am I giving this book two stars instead of one? I guess I am softie at heart, and I see -- or at least intuit -- that Naipaul is in fact a good writer (perhaps only in some alternate universe), that he is thoughtful and meticulous, and that maybe he only needs someone to kick him out of this funk of pompous self-grandiosity.

This book didn't fill me with any deep insights except possibly into Naipaul's conceit. Despite some occasional beautiful description this book doesn't do much. Naipaul's pontifications on the "common people" approach the truly condescending as he attempts to "understand" them. And yet it all seems geared as a justification for his own preoccupied ruminations. I just don't think it's Naipaul's best which is when he's got a real story to tell, his own or someone else's. I'm just not that interested in Naipaul's thought processes. Or maybe I just don't like them, either way he's written better. Possibly if he wasn't so self absorbed and inherently elitist I could like him better. When he uses his sharp mind for a better purpose he writes more interesting books.