Word: enigma
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...Enigma of Arrival...
Others are not so sure. "He's a total enigma to me," says former Mayor Charlotte Townsend. To David Maradei, a former city council member and Townsend ally, "He's a mayor without vision. Like Reagan, he's an ideologue." Adds Sandy Swain, one of six members of the planning commission given their walking papers by the new mayor: "He's a vindictive man. You don't want to get on his hit list...
...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...