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 …
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Citation: Munos, Delphine. "The Enigma of Arrival". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 September 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=956, accessed 25 November 2024.]
