The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul (1988). This chilly yet hypnotic antinovel—devoid of plot or conventional psychologizing—shuttles among the narrator’s childhood memories of his native Trinidad, fictionalized accounts of that island’s colonization, and elegiac descriptions of his present life in Wiltshire, England, where the charms of rural English life are eroding under the pressures of modernization. With an immigrant’s attentiveness, Naipaul details the minutiae of bleak exile, revealing a writer at home only in language.
Total Points: 4 (AW 4)