came together for the death of this sister and felt the need to honor and remember. It forced us to look on death. It forced me to face the death I had been contemplating at night, in my sleep; it fitted a real grief where melancholy had created a vacancy, as if to prepare me for the moment. It 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.
October 1984-April 1986
By V.S. Naipaul
FICTION
The Mystic Masseur (1957)
Miguel Street (1959)
A House for Mr Biswas (1961)
The Mimic Men (1967)
In a Free State (1971)
Guerrillas (1975)
A Bend in the River (1979)
The Enigma of Arrival (1987)
A Way in the World (1994)
Half a Life (2001)
The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book and Other Comic Inventions (2002)
Magic Seeds (2004)
NONFICTION
The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America (1962)
An Area of Darkness (1964)
The Loss of El Dorado: A Colonial History (1969)
India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)
Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981)
A Turn in the South (1989)
India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998)
Letters Between a Father and Son (1999)
The Writer and The World: Essays (Edited by Pankaj Mishra) (2002)
Literary Occasions: Essays (Edited By Pankaj Mishra) (2003)
A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (2007)
In 1932, V.S. Naipaul was born to an Indian family in colonial Trinidad. Attending Oxford in 1950 on a scholarship, his literary career began immediately after finishing university. He has since published over twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including A House for Mr. Biswas, Among the Believers, Magic Seeds, and The Enigma of Arrival. Naipaul’s lifelong passion for travel and travel writing began in 1960, and his voyages through the West Indies, South America, Asia, Africa, and the United States have been recorded in great works such as The Middle Passage, his acclaimed India trilogy, The Loss of El Dorado, and A Turn in the South.
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.
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 1988
Copyright © 1987 by V. S. Naipaul
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1987.
Portions of this book were originally published in The New Yorker.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74403-6