The Enigma of Arrival
Naipaul, V. S.
own tragi-comic lives, told their own stories, and earned for themselves a literary immortality one fears is not in store for the comparatively sparse, arid population of Enigma. "El or the first...
...There is a bit too much here of the obliviously selfish hypochondriac, a not-so-young Werther, beyond suicide but still prone to emotional self-absorption...
...While this failing is typical of a whole class of conspicuously "sensitive" (or, as Mr...
...I could hardly see where I was...
...it is a minor guide to a major man of letters...
...To write about a former friend's unhappiness is not 'too unsettling,' but to try to alleviate it is...
...Perhaps, but unfortunately, it seems more entangled in his latest work than in most of the full-hearted, almost Dickensian effusions of his early years, when his wounded central ego was less intrusive, and a delightful gallery of colorful, distinctive individual characters in Miguel Street, The Suffrage of Elvira, The Mystic Masseur, and, most of all, A House for Mr...
...By contrast, his appetite for endlessly savoring his own past emotional wounds, both large and small, seems inexhaustible...
...and far away, depending on the light, glints of a little river, glints which sometimes appeared, oddly, to be above the level of the land...
...THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL V. S. Naipaul/Alfred A. Knopf/$17.95 Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...Naipaul such an incisive debunker of the half-baked and the third-worldly in novels like Guerrillas and A Bend in the River (not to mention his extensive body of books and essays treating the same subjects factually, notably India: A Wounded Civilization, An Area of Darkness, and The Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad), when embedded in the central character of Aram Bakshian, Jr writes frequently on politics, history, and the arts...
...Their joys (of which there are characteristically few) and their travails (of which there are characteristically many) are more curious than real, something for the narrator to watch, not feel...
...Usually, however, it is the impatience of appetite, not boredom, the annoyances of the journey compensated for by the satisfaction of the reader's—if not the narrator's—arrival...
...While it is this very sense of critical alienation that has made Mr...
...Biswas, lived their A particularly illuminating case in point is the narrator's handling of an incident involving a woman who had treated him with kindness in London when he was a hapless young college student from the colonies...
...Nor, to those unfamiliar with most of Mr...
...As with some of his more memorable past fictional characters, Mr...
...This has prompted at least one critic, novelist Francis King, writing in the London Spectator, to observe that there "is always -something shocking in the self-protectiveness of writers...
...Naipaul's own...
...Although, with its rustic cottage setting and "second childhood" subtheme of delayed self-definition, it might well have been called A House for Mr...
...And her disturbance, her instability . . . was too unsettling to me...
...She is lonely, in an obvious state of distress...
...Naipaul characterizes himself, "raw-nerved") artists, few authors of Mr...
...The importance of that body of work, however, gives Enigma a value considerably beyond its limited appeal as a piece of fiction...
...Naipaul, one of the most impressive authors writing in English today, leads them through 354 pages of symbolism and reverie marketed as fiction but smelling strongly of autobiography...
...It would have been physically hard for me to go where she was...
...Naipaul's previous nineteen works (ten novels and nine volumes of nonfiction) will the effort necessarily prove rewarding...
...Naipaul, Enigma is not a self-supporting structure...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 41...
...For the casual reader, this will not be an easy book...
...Years later, as a successful writer, he receives a letter from her...
...All apply, in part if not in full, and there is an irritating element of repetition—as of frequent, slowly contracted circling around central details or insights—that may make the reader lose patience...
...Naipaul, recharging the emotional batteries of a great talent capable of far greater future work...
...El or the first four days it rained," begins the narrator of V. S. Naipaul's latest novel...
...If it does not represent V. S. Naipaul, the novelist, at his best, it does offer many insights into Mr...
...Enigma the same trait does not make for a particularly pleasant—or sympathetic—hero/narrator...
...Naipaul's stature have been so mired in it...
...Sometimes engrossing, sometimes annoying, Enigma is both a sketchbook of simple, eternal variations on the theme of life's change and decay (set in a contemporary corner of rural England) and a rather spooky, if instructive, guided tour of its author's talented, troubled personality...
...Too often, other characters, though sharply, sometimes brilliantly observed, emerge from the page only as still photos of specimens viewed under a microscope...
...Naipaul's autobiographical narrator in Enigma is a man haunted by two fears, failure and madness...
...Typical adjectives used by other reviewers to describe it have been "odd," "haunting," and "alienated...
...Naipaul himself...
...Then it stopped raining and beyond the lawn and outbuildings in front of my cottage I saw fields with stripped trees on the boundaries of each field...
...He is also a formerly struggling, now established, Trinidad-born, Hindu-descended man of letters with a strong sense of distaste for almost every element of his personal and ancestral past, both of which are virtually identical to Mr...
...One can only hope that writing Enigma has had a cathartic effect on Mr...
...Both its relevance and its revelations are largely dependent on a previous familiarity with the author and his body of work...
...The words could just as easily apply to the sense of gradually dispelling fog, and tantalizing horizon beyond, felt by readers of The Enigma of Arrival as Mr...
...He shares her desolation—along with most of the contents of her letter—with his readers, only to conclude: "I didn't go to see her...
...Will it pass with time...
Vol. 20 • July 1987 • No. 7
