Word: enigma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pages Percy devotes to establishing and then fleshing out this mystery are as gripping as any he has ever written. Dr. More's slow piecing together of unsettling symptoms proceeds with nightmarish fascination. Any solution to such a carefully rendered enigma is likely to seem a letdown, and Percy's answer threatens, for a time, to stop The Thanatos Syndrome dead in its tracks. Tom, aided by his young, distant and potentially kissing cousin Lucy Lipscomb, herself a doctor and an epidemiologist, discovers that the local water supply is being laced with heavy sodium from the coolant of a nearby...
Although it is called a novel, The Enigma of Arrival stretches the line between fiction and autobiography nearly to the vanishing point. The unnamed narrator is a writer in his mid-50s, an Indian and a Hindu, born in Trinidad, educated at Oxford, who has traveled extensively and lived most of his adult life in England. This person, in other words, is indistinguishable from V.S. Naipaul; and the personality, the tone of voice and cast of mind displayed here resemble the prose of Naipaul's nonfiction (Among the Believers; India: A Wounded Civilization) more closely than that of his other...
...valley has come to an end, his stoic acceptance of change falters: "Philosophy failed me now. Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memories." The conclusion to be drawn from The Enigma of Arrival is both heartbreaking and bracing: the only antidote to destruction -- of dreams, of reality -- is remembering. As eloquently as anyone now writing, Naipaul remembers...
...heart of every great show-business career is an enigma. No matter how manifest a performer's talent, no matter how assiduously he courts his fans, there remains a puzzlement: In a fragmented and fickle world, what accounts for enormous, enduring popularity...
Though he nearly won the Democratic nomination in 1984, former Colorado Senator Gary Hart remains an enigma to many. This is the second in a series of profiles exploring the personalities and characters of the major 1988 contenders...