The Enigma of Arrival

The Enigma of Arrival is a novel published in 1987 by Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul. Largely autobiographical, it is organised into five sections that reflect the author's growing familiarity with the countries he reached after leaving his native Trinidad, and the shifting way he saw them. Most of the action takes place in Wiltshire, England, where Naipaul has rented a cottage in the countryside. At first he regards the surrounding area as a piece of history frozen for centuries; as his stay lengthens, he comes to see it as a constantly changing place, home to ordinary people living lives apart from the rest of the world. This leads him to reflect on how our perceptions of our surroundings are shaped by our preconceptions of a place. He also re-examines his own emigration from Trinidad to New York City and his later move to England and Oxford.

His landlord is modelled on Stephen Tennant (1906–1987), a 1920s socialite and one of the "bright young things" of the period, who also inspired characters in novels by Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Naipaul rented a cottage on Tennant's Wilsford House estate, north of Salisbury. When the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, it singled out the book as "his masterpiece", praising its unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture and the decline of European neighbourhoods.