Word: naipauls
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This open admission of personal weakness is disarming, hiding the fact that Naipaul is really commenting on human nature: all of us occasionally choose to "forget" embarrassing incidents. Such "I'm guilty, too" tactics are part of the essence of Naipaul's powerful style: it is difficult to resist his criticism of human flaws when he includes himself...
Unfortunately, The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul's new autobiographical novel, suffers from a surfeit of description and fantasy, leaving one bored instead of touched by its detailed portrait of the English countryside in decay...
...until well into the book's second section that we get the frank self-criticism and irony described above and for which Naipaul is so justly famous. It isn't until then, more than a quarter of the way into his autobiographical novel in a section called "The Journey," that he describes his departure from his birthplace in Trinidad at age 18 to study at Oxford and "become a writer...
...NAIPAUL NEVER escapes from a problem which he admits he had as an Oxford student: ignoring real life in favor of "metropolitan material," that undefined something that "the writer" is supposed to write about. The older narrator deplores the romantic fantasies he wrote when he was younger. Yet that is just what the book goes back to after the brief respite of "The Journey": a sappy fantasy of English country life, elaborating on what he already has said in the first section...
...that section, Naipaul describes how, after 10 years in England and a few successes, he settled into a cottage on the edge of an estate in a river valley near Salisbury. There he stays for another decade, watching the changes in the land and people around him and experiencing mixed feelings about what he sees as "a world in flux: the drum of creation in the god's right hand, the flame of destruction in his left...