Join me in reading V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. This is under the auspices of A Public Space. We start on March 23, 2026. The reading will stretch over 30 days; reading a daily average of 10-12 pages. My daily notes on the pages we are reading will be emailed to you if you sign-up with APS. After the final day of reading we will have a webinar discussion about the novel on April 21 and you can register for that here.
Here is more from the website of A Public Space:
The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul was published in March 1987. In its citation for the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he was awarded in 2001, the Swedish Academy called the book a “masterpiece” in which “Naipaul visits the reality of England like an anthropologist studying some hitherto unexplored native tribe deep in the jungle.” That was interesting, this reversal of the gaze by a postcolonial writer, but The Enigma of Arrival has fascinated me more for what the Academy had to say about Naipaul’s “inimitable voice,” disregarding genres and fashioning “a style of his own, in which the customary distinctions between fiction and non-fiction are of subordinate importance.” How to understand the book’s originality? More than one writer has talked about their response to a book that is boring and yet mesmerizing: How is the writer able to do this? I want to know. Maybe we can discuss the book’s beguiling rhythm: Is it that of nature itself, and the pace attuned to the time it takes for the narrator to heal. And all the detailed descriptions of the new landscape—is it because, as Salman Rushdie put it, “the immigrant must invent the earth beneath his feet”?