V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival

Delphine Munos (Université de Liège)
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In her article “The House That Jack Did Not Build”, Elisabetta Tarantino wonders whether V.S. Naipaul’s subtitling of

The Enigma of Arrival

, “a novel in five sections”, does not follow some “lucus a non lucendo” logic: “I’ll call it a novel because it is not: it is an autobiography” (Tarantino, 1998, 169). Indeed, engaging with this self-proclaimed novel, its readership cannot overlook the numerous parallels between Naipaul’s own history and that of the first-person narrator of the book, which are both marked by colonialism, exile, and the complications of a writing career striving to gain recognition in the U.K. even as it takes the colonial world as its main subject-matter. Obsessed with notions of inheritance and origins,

The Enigma of Arrival

both fits a

2685 words

Citation: Munos, Delphine. "The Enigma of Arrival". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 September 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=956, accessed 19 March 2024.]

956 The Enigma of Arrival 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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