In the spring of 1978 I gave a lecture at Columbia University, New York, to primarily West Indian students, on the manner in which resistance fashioned Caribbean literature. One of the students asked how V. S. Naipaul's work fitted into that pattern. I answered that although the work of some novelists may have been fashioned by the positive dimensions of that tradition (for example, George Lamming), others, such as V. S. Naipaul, had responded to its negative aspects. A fellow panelist commented that Naipaul was "just reactionary." This remark sent me in search of a fuller account of his work, convinced that a writer as important as V. S. Naipaul
Winner of the Nobel Prize, Naipaul has traveled throughout the world, looking at its varied cultures and seeking out others' stories, recording and transforming them. His engagement with postcolonial cultures informs his novels, such as Guerrillas and A Bend in the River. However, it is his documentaries (such as Among the Believers and Beyond Belief) and his works that combine actual and fictional histories and memories (Finding the Center, The Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World) that best exhibit a growing awareness of the complexities of cultural difference
The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections is a 1987 novel by Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul. Mostly an autobiography, the book is composed of four sections which reflect the growing familiarity and changing perceptions of Naipaul upon his arrival in various countries after leaving his native Trinidad and Tobago.
