The enigmatic "Enigma"

(Jack's Garden)

The beginning gripped me with his description of the countryside after the snowfall: things becoming outlined and becoming more distinct. Jump from that into talk of Salisbury, Stonehenge, and John Constable, I got quite excited about this novel.

After a time reading this book, I couldn't help notice it didn't seem structured to propel itself forward as most stories seem to. I have to admit breathing a sigh of relief when the first bit of dialogue happened! His writing style I find quite unusual; each paragraph seems to be a work of literature in miniature, almost like a haiku with an arch of beginning, middle and end. So many paragraphs can stand alone, much like a
haiku or poem. 

Although I had a hard time getting used to the book as a whole, I like the vignettes, and the images Naipaul conveys.

A few things struck a nerve as well: I can't think of any architecture as visually endearing as an English thatched cottage, and I found it tragic to read of their demise. I noticed I also had a real reaction (!) to his telling of the woman who picks up her kids from the school bus, and never acknowledges that he steps aside so that she may pass (I have a real things about good manners! *lol*).

The point that really got me, though, was: "all the ground that had been Jack's garden...and the gardens...of the other cottages, all that had been concreted over". As a recreational gardener, that broke my heart. I honestly was moved to tears by

"surely below all that concrete over his garden some seed, some root, would survive; and one day perhaps, when the concrete was taken up...one day perhaps...some shrub or flower or vine, would come to life again"

I think it a scandal, and I often shake my head at the arable land that has been put under asphalt.

And so, onto part 2!

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Final Review

I don't have a lot to add since my last review, really, as the momentum of the book seems to be a constant.

Someone commented a while ago about skipping to the "good bits". Since the book was so constant in it's narrative, I found I couldn't do that. I found everything was more or less on a continuum and skipping anything meant I might as well have skipped everything. This was definitely an all-or-nothing trip.

A few more points I found interesting: One thing he mentions a couple of times (it's come up whether or not he's repetitive--I would so "no" on the whole, but he does seem to repeat a line or two occasionally, usually to pick up again after he's gone on a tangent) and which I could not really relate to, being a student of history and of people (which I would assume he was, too) is that he could not "grasp the historical reality of France". I just found it odd, given his examination of all things, that this would elude him. 

The travel-thing...my first time traveling alone was only a few years ago, and I have to agree: it IS disorienting and a tad overwhelming (then again... tackling Los Angeles International and then JFK... maybe I should have started small! *lol*). The novelty has definitely worn out as far as airplane travel is concerned!

At one point he seems to come across as a bit astonished that he did NOT observe certain things. As he reprimands himself, I feel he reprimands all of us...that we do not pay enough attention to the things around us: as I said in my last post, the profundity in the everyday.

He tells us of an elderly lady who come back to the area in which she grew up, and his embarrassment at the the changes that left her mental image in opposition to the reality of the environs: "all the things that had disoriented the old lady and made her question where she was".

This resonates with me on 2 levels. I work work as a Music Therapist with Alzheimer patients...all people who sometimes don't even remember their familiar surroundings, and who now constantly question where they are. 

Second, I had the good fortune to grow up and live in the same neighborhood till my early 30's and to have a home/house to which I was very deeply attached. Life being what is it, those inevitable changes do come, and the house is no more. It's been a deep loss that I still sometimes struggle with...I feel like a snail without my shell. Like the old lady, my true home is gone forever. One thing we can't escape in Naipaul's book is a sense of place and its real weightiness.

This book has been tough read, but I was determined it would not defeat me. I think this has been our baptism by fire! Although it was not a book I would normally have read, I appreciate being exposed to it, and having read it, I'm glad I did. The images will stick for a long time.

'The Enigma of Arrival' by V.S. Naipaul

"Enigma of Arrival" was a book I thought I would have done in two days but found myself finishing weeks after I started reading it (finally finished last night).

I found the first chapter to be way to lengthy with description and it drove me crazy. I love description but too much is just too much. I felt that Naipaul while writing the book might have thought that the reader wouldn't understand what he was describing and he had to continually state what the object was. That drove me crazy and I'm sorry but once a person writes for example, about a metal bracket as Naipaul did I know what they are describing why repeat themselves. He seemed to do this quite a few times in the first part. I think that is why it took me so long to read the first part.

After putting the book down for a week, I went into reading the second part with the questions that were posted earlier on the list in mind. I figured if I'm going to finish this book I have to try a different approach. Once I started reading the second part I was like okay this is better. I liked his flashback to his youthful days when he first arrived in England, and I thought okay this is going to be a better read then the first part. As I continued to read on I got bored, I got bored with his being displeased with his accomplishments, how he dwelled on his misfortunes and that he didn't have any desire to interact with other people. One of the questions asked earlier on the list was: What question do you find yourself asking as you read the book? I kept asking why? why did this book win a Nobel Prize. I figured maybe I'd find out in the last two parts.

Well my question was still unanswered. The third part was like reading the first and it was a struggle for me and the last part was just too depressing for me. I didn't identify with any of the characters in the book, and unfortunately there was nothing that I liked about the book. I think it was Beth (and I'm sorry if I got the wrong person) who summon up what the book was:

"Condescending, arrogant, depressing all fit as descriptions of the tone of this book.  Throughout we see the most negative side of a self pitying, self involved, deliberate outsider."

I totally agree with her.

'The Enigma Of Arrival' by V.S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul's "Enigma of Arrival" is not something I would have picked up off the shelf. I usually read 500 page thrillers and suspense novels in a matter of days, so I was expecting to have this one read in even less time.  It took me over 5 weeks.  As a 21 year old university student I really had nothing to relate to in the first chapter. Naipaul's lengthy descriptions of his surroundings down to the blades of grass had me bored out of my mind.  I was sound asleep after reading 2 or 3 pages.  I struggled for just over 2 weeks in that chapter alone. That's not to say there wasn't anything interesting in the entire chapter.  Naipaul caught my attention briefly when he attempted some public interaction.  Unfortunately those moments were few.  However, I made it through to chapter two.
 
Starting chapter two was like opening a whole new book.  In "Journey" Naipaul flashed back to his youthful days when he first arrived in England.  The promise of a good future captured my attention and I progressed much more quickly through the page.   After a while, though, it became apparent to me that this was not the story I though it was. The author seemed constantly displeased with his accomplishments.  He even stated that he should have been satisfied, but wasn't.  He dwelled on his misfortunes and didn't show much desire to interact with other people.  By the end of the chapter I was once again bored, especially as he returned to the "present". 

My boredom continued into chapter 3 (and beyond).  I realized, as I was reading, that part of my boredom came from the fact that I just didn't care about the narrator or any characters in the book.  Naipaul's standoffish style prevented me from growing attached to him or any other people he mentioned.  In fact, I had just finished reading a paragraph when I thought to myself "I don't care!"  Naipaul didn't show emotion unless it was his shame, and even that was "just the facts."
 
The remainder of the book was a complete downer, which was even too boring for me to use as a sedative to relieve insomnia.  Throughout the book I had the sense that Naipaul was writing it to impress some elitist group with his (over) humbleness.  Perhaps my age and fast-paced lifestyle has prevented me from being able to fully appreciate this work, but I highly doubt I will read another of V.S. Naipaul's books. 

The End

"The Enigma of Arrival"

When I closed this book after reading the final pages my first thought was that while initially I found the novel difficult to enjoy, that changed the more I read.  The book evolved into a tale that was oddly compelling.  It was if I had been rewarded after slogging through a complex task.  And rewarded I surely was as “The Enigma of Arrival” crept up on me, surprising me, leaving me in awe once again at the power of the written word. 

Unexpectedly the rhythm of the words and Naipaul’s seemingly random observations began to weave a tapestry that slowly took shape.  A tapestry of a landscape and the characters who inhabit that landscape. Characters bound together not by choice, but rather bound together haphazardly by the very landscape that they inhabit.  Through that tapestry of characters, and the changes he observes in the landscape surrounding them the author ponders his own life.

Naipaul writes that the story he had originally set out to tell had instead become the story of  “…my journey, the writer’s journey, the writer defined by his writing discoveries, his ways of seeing, rather than by his personal adventures…”  Seeing, or perceiving, is the theme that runs continuously through this novel.

Another prevalent theme is change.  Changes small and large.  Perceptions, landscapes and lives are constantly being remade through small occurrences and major milestones.  A storm that causes a tree to fall.  The visit of a stranger.  Or a death that inadvertently touches one and all.

With candid and keen observations the manor and it’s garden become a microcosm.  No matter what other paths the author may temporarily take us down, eventually we are returned to the manor and it’s garden.  It is as if after a temporary divergence everything starts over once again. The same ideas are

repeated, the same themes explored, each time with new images.

Naipaul’s ability to build up images and the authenticity of the details makes this novel and the characters you meet in it linger in your mind. Bray, the Phillipses and Pitton with his proper suite and tie are people I won’t soon forget.  Likewise Jack, Alan and the landlord with a plump white thigh.  The manor and it’s surrounding grounds slowly losing their battle with neglect and the march of time.  A countryside, ever changing with the coming of the seasons one after the other.  Farmland that defeats some and nourishes others.

“The Enigma of Arrival”  certainly took me by surprise.  But it was a pleasant, at time wondrous surprise, and I appreciate the author letting me come along on his journey.

"The Enigma of Arrival" by V. S. Naipaul

As some members have pointed out, this is not a rip-snorting yarn with an intriguing plot.  Yet it is well written, and as an historian, I did find it contained a number of fascinating themes and metaphors (and that's where I got most satisfaction from the book). So, to the point at hand (and if I haven't made anything clear, I'd be only to happen to clarify anyone's queries)- 

This is not so much a review of the novel, as an assessment of one of its principal themes – personal displacement in an era of imperial decline. More specifically, I am intrigued by the question of temporal displacement in the novel, more so than Naipaul's usual theme of spatial displacement. What I mean by temporal displacement is a situation when certain people, including the author, find that `time is out of joint' with their own lives. We often find these people living in the past, mulling over past glories, resenting the present and fearful of the future. This cultural phenomenon is endemic in Britain in its period of imperial decline. For example, V. S. Naipaul described the glory `time of empire' as `perfection' (p. 52).

The subsequent decline of empire is therefore the ruin of perfection. This effectively meant that he was living in Britain in the wrong era. His answer was to time-travel, not in the way science fiction writers speak of it, but in the only way possible (at least for the foreseeable future). Our inner selves can travel to different epochs, a form of time travel permitted by many cultures, and sustained by history, myth and tradition. Simply speaking, there are people who live in the past. The natural outcome of such cultural time travel is temporal displacement.

Temporal displacement and spatial displacement often go hand in hand. In England, the countryside often represents the past, townships the present, and the cities the future. Country people fearful of the encroachment of the cities, often describe it not in spatial terms, but temporal ones. "That's the future for you" they say pointing to some terrible incident that occurred in the city. The city also meant that other, ultimate temporal and spatial displacement Naipaul refers to - death. 

Naipaul found that he did not meditate on imperial decline while he was at the English country manor house (p. 53). To him, it represented the empire's still beating heart - the heart of a mother country whose love he yearned for, but never fully received. London, on the other hand, "was the less than perfect world" (p. 121) - a place of desolation, decay and death. So it was in the countryside that Naipaul went and "cultivated old, possibly ancestral ways of feeling" (p. 53). Such feelings were more difficult to cultivate in decaying London. Yet even there, in that big cosmopolitan metropolis, we find temporal and spatial displacement twinned. When I was living in London some years ago, I would often find myself asking people for directions. Almost invariably they would direct me according to landmarks that were important or sacred to them. A drinker would send me on my way via all the pubs in the district, and shoppers via all the grocery stores. Intriguingly, the most common response was to guide me via sites that were either long demolished or completely transformed. 

Several people guided me via an old motorbike factory (demolished 15 year before), a cinema (transformed into a Bingo Hall 10 years before), and a munitions factory (now a small facade of the  Edwardian era). One person even directed me via the local, long-demolished Victorian workhouse! How on earth they thought that I, a newcomer to the area, would be able to find my way with such directions was beyond me—at least at the time. I soon came to realize that these people were displaced in both a temporal and spatial sense. Yet unlike Naipaul, many of them were indigenous to the locality and had lived there all their lives. They were culturally displaced in their own time and space. Because their roots were either demolished or transformed, they felt like aliens in their own city. 

Naipaul, on the other hand, never had strong cultural roots. His were spread out thinly across the globe, decaying with the empire that had sustained them in days long gone. No wonder he sought to find an ancestral home in the heart of empire, where one could still imagine the glory days of the Raj. Yet even here he felt like an alien. So stretched and decayed were his roots, that nowhere was truly home. He traveled the globe as if to gather those roots up, and in the enigma of arrival he found desolation and decay. In a sense, he never really arrived at establishing the cultural roots he yearned for, and so he never truly felt at home anywhere. In the end, his arrival at that theoretical ancestral home remains an enigma.

On the last page (p. 318), Naipaul writes that, "Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are". He immediately added the caution that, "history,  like sanctity, can reside in the heart". And the heart builds "a fantasy of home", one that is often located in the mythical idyllic past. History thereby becomes myth, and sustains a dream world for people who seek refuge from the future by living in the past.

For me, the home that Naipaul seeks is an illusion. He searches for both an ancestral home that doesn't really exist and for cultural roots that now reside mainly in history books and novels. The tragedy is that when one lives according to such illusory dreams they more often then not become real nightmares. This is perhaps the reason why Naipaul is haunted by his paradoxical visions, and  constantly returns to them in his novels.

"The Enigma of Arrival"

Review by Pauline

This is my first review in about 2 decades, like most folks. As that is the case, I'm not entirely certain that this format is suitable, as I've not been reading the reviews of others. I wanted my impressions to be as unadulterated as possible.

Firstly, this book is seriously off-genre for me. I'm a hard-core sci-fi reader, having branched past Trek fiction in '92. I also read Christian historical  fiction and children's classics. Not exactly a standard combo, for sure. But, the point is that this book was so off-genre that to say I struggled with it would complement my efforts :-(

I got off on the wrong foot by finding the first chapter a lyric effort in depression and boredom. Having grown up in a foggy locale, anything resembling a foggy place I find incredibly dreary and wearisome. The language was certainly evocative of the setting, but certainly not one to draw me in, or keep my interest sated.

The second chapter, "the Journey" left me floundering. I felt that the reading never really 'pinned down' a reason to be. Having gone through a journey myself, though not a traveling one, I felt like the author was not really sure where he ended up. Any decisiveness felt like it was mitigated by a level of uncertainty that nullified any sense of 'finding' that I felt.

Had this book been one I'd chosen myself, I'd not have made it to this point with out having abandoned it fully.

"Ivy" left me feeling as if I'd taken an unguided journey thru the mind of a profound schizophrenic. Though the characters to which we are introduced seemed to have a common thread in his life, I almost got the sense that they were arbitrarily chosen, and certainly not presented in a way that made me care.
By this point, my only feeling was that I was nearly through this read, and certainly to be soon put out of my misery.

I'm still confused as to the point of the remainder of the book! I felt
like I meandered through the dirty laundry and traumas of someone's
mind, with no real thread or emotional tie holding it together.

I thought I would easily finish "The Enigma of Arrival" in a day or two--after all, it only has 350-odd pages--but I was quite mistaken. I had never come across this style of writing before. This is a book best read slowly and in solitude and silent concentration, in order to appreciate the full effect of it. Despite being classified as fiction, "Enigma" bears more resemblance to an autobiography, having little of the action or plot that a novel usually implies. Instead, the book focuses more on mood, self-awareness, and perceptions of people and surroundings. The characters don't really seem to be independent characters or protagonists at all, but merely people observed by and commented upon by the writer, just like any inanimate  objects he describes, serving only to illustrate a point or a theme. Mr. Naipaul typifies the style of his book by saying, "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, writer and man separating at the beginning of the journey and coming together again in a second life just before the end."

The first chapter may seem particularly slow and repetitive, focusing as it does on change and decay (themes recurring throughout the book), but the persistent Reader will be well rewarded by the faster pace, fascinating details of the author's life, and enjoyable character expansion found in the  remainder of the book. Also detracting from the smooth flow of the narrative is the fact that the author constantly switches back and forth (often at the oddest times) between various subjects, time periods, and locations--from leaving Trinidad at age eighteen, through living for a decade in the English countryside twenty years later--seemingly with no pattern. It can be quite confusing unless the Reader has been paying very careful  attention to everything previously written. Gradually, though, such irritations are barely noticeable as the book becomes increasingly engrossing.

The majority of the book seems rather depressing or negative on the surface. At its mildest, the author's unhappy thoughts on the changes he observes over the course of time and in his acquaintances, as well as the slow decay he notices in his countryside--the manor grounds on which he lives, and surrounding homes and landscapes, populated by damaged  characters (varying in degree)--are somewhat reminiscent of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." At its worst, the author dwells so heavily upon such themes as disillusionment, loss, nerves, anxiety, illness, and death  that the book can become quite wearisome and painful to read. It's not  entirely gloomy, though; the most depressing passages are usually  confined to brief concentrations of misery, surrounded by long stretches of thought- provoking introspection, lovely descriptions of nature that would  rival an Edwin Way Teale book, and general narrative or character development. The author seems to take much delight in his countryside surroundings (wherein he has happily found a fresh start in life after so much stress and upheaval while establishing himself as a writer) and pleasant aspects of his past travels, and he displays a certain fondness for many of the characters he describes.

I quite enjoyed this book, in spite of its darker themes, since I have shared many of the same experiences and emotions that Mr. Naipaul expertly describes, and also for the delight in the occasional mention of cities, artists, and works of literature, among other things, which have personal meaning for me. His masterful choice of descriptive words or phrases is often stunningly beautiful. Would I recommend this book to others? That's difficult to say. Lovers of English life should enjoy it well enough (it's the  main reason I read it), and perhaps people interested in writing or philosophy. It can be difficult to read, in terms of its writing style and its negativity, but the positive aspects just below the surface make it worth the effort. All things considered, I would say that I am indefinably better off for having read this book.