V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

Naipaul’s numerous literary awards include the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Booker Prize in 1971 for In a Free State , and the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in British Literature (1993). Naipaul was knighted in 1990, and holds honorary degrees from the universities of Cambridge, London, and Oxford. His next work, The Masque of Africa , will be published in the United States in September. He lives in Wiltshire, England with his wife, Nadira.

Through a unique blend of fiction and memoir, revealing the inner workings of one of English literature’s greatest minds, V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival charts a writer’s course from Trinidad to the British countryside and back again, meditating on the act of the journey, the notion of home, and the way a writer perceives the world.

An Indian writer from Trinidad resides on a secluded country manor in Wiltshire, where he observes the gradual but drastic transformation of the English countryside throughout the latter half of the 20th century. At age 18, he had left his birthplace of Trinidad to attend Oxford on a scholarship, arriving in London with an expectation to see the city with Dickens’ childlike wonder. After some time, he finds himself an established writer, but is ungrounded in England and his journeys abroad until he settles into the picturesque dairy cottage near Stonehenge. As the narrator constructs with magnificent detail the story of the pastoral idyll forced to confront modernity, he reflects on his progress as a writer and on the geographies that have informed his work.

The Enigma of Arrival portrays a world of hidden English gardens and lush tropical plains, delighting the imagination while demanding the reader to consider anew how he observes the world around him. Perhaps Naipaul’s most autobiographical work, the book provides a glimpse into the writing of masterpieces such as The Middle Passage, In a Free State , and The Loss of El Dorado , and subtly investigates the ways in which the ending of the British Empire influenced the author’s critical eye. Recalling Proust and Joyce, but written in a voice like no other, Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival is a beautiful consideration of the connections between memory and fiction; progress and sacrifice; education and experience.