THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL
V.S. Naipaul
New York: Knopf
352 pp., $17.95
This has been, among other things, a century of displacement. The torrid events of our epoch have thrown millions into motion, bringing them to rest in unfamiliar places among people who are strange and, frequently, unwelcoming. There was a time when one's life, from birth to death, was bounded by a few short miles. One was raised to belong to the social and physical world in which one would live as an adult. Opportunities for bettering oneself were meager; ambition could produce little more than frustration and bitterness, but at least one felt at home and among those to whom one belonged. In this century, the lure of places where one could better oneself or the dangers that threatened if one stayed put have set large numbers of people in motion. They left the regions and lives of their ancestors, never to return.
V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival is a subtle and complicated document of such a passage, Naipaul's own. The immigrant novel or memoir is a common work whose form and shape can be easily described: a review of the personal and social conditions in the country of origin, an account of the uprooting and passage to the new land, a reminiscence of the unexpectedly harsh conditions found and endured on arrival and, usually, a tale of triumph and success in the construction of a new life. All these elements are, to be sure, present in The Enigma of Arrival, but they have been cast in such a form as to be hardly discernible.
Naipaul is one of the best writers on the world scene today. He is also one of the most prolific. He was born in Trinidad, a descendant of laborers who had migrated from India near the turn of the century. Everyone's personal history is, in part, a history of a family. This is a thought that Naipaul shares. He writes,
It is as if we all carry in our makeup the effects of accidents that have befallen our ancestors, as we are in many ways programmed before we are born, our lives half outlined for us.
Naipaul's extended personal history thus contains a double migration, traversing half the globe. The first stage of this history is communal. A number of Indian immigrants, principally indentured laborers, come to Trinidad and try to retain the cultural and religious life or their forefathers. The second stage, however, is individual and solitary. Naipaul, a bright and ambitious boy, wins a scholarship to Oxford and leaves his home, his family, and his world and travels alone to England, where he gets his education, his calling, and the fulfillment of his ambitions. In this move, the lone migrant abandons the traditional religion and assimilates and masters the high culture of the host country. He remains a resident of England to this day.
Naipaul, then, has lived in England for three decades, or most of his adult life. And yet, up until now, his writings, with the single exception of the minor novel Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, have not been set in the world that he has made his. His first works, the hilarious early novels, recently republished together under the title Three Novels, and his masterly A House for Mr. Biswas, were set in his native Trinidad. Since then, work after
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