V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (1987)

This is a fabulous book but not necessarily one I'd recommend to other people. Because it has no plot, very little by way of character, no moral dilemmas. Mostly, it has scenery. Scenery, and a few reflections on the humans that emerge from the scenery. To read it requires a certain diligence, and an appreciation for tininess of detail. That tininess of detail should be a problem may strike you as the idea of a fool and a lover of bad books, but the thing here is that tiny details are almost all you get. Tiny details and big insights: in that way it reminded me of A la recherche. I would guess that smarter & more well-read people have made this comparison, but I'm not going to bother finding out. Other than the scenery and lack of identifiable substance, one thing that reminded me of Proust was the love of linguistic misunderstanding on the part of the little people: one old man tells him something is an "old wise tale," and he loves that; another is a local habit of calling the place where you put dead leaves the refuge instead of refuse (they call all refuse refuge, but it has its most poetic echo when it's the garden refuge). Incidentally, in addition to the lack of plot there is paucity of character -- leaving you with what, you might want to know; as I said, it leaves you with foliage and dirt roads.

In the beginning, there is nothing but the foliage and the roads and the flowers and a garden belonging to someone named Jack, who we are told almost nothing about except that at some point he dies after which his wife moves away and the garden is paved over. After reading about a hundred pages, I wrote the following:

It slows your heartbeat. Or it makes me feel that i must exert control and slow my heart because otherwise I will never be able to keep pace with the writing, will run on ahead and lose the book entirely. And that happens a lot, even though it's not a difficult book, or -- not a book of difficult sentences, but in the description following description of country landscape for forty pages almost nonstop, my eyes glaze over. That makes it sound like a bad book but by some weird trick it manages to avoid being one. I'm not a huge fan of lengthy description ever, and of natural scenery least of all, but here I am drawn in by it, for several reasons: firstly, the heartbeat thing. I can't think of another book that's made me thoughtful of my heartrate and in addition, reading it allows me to calm everything down, almost like a meditation. Secondly, it's completely unlike anything I've read before and might be significantly different than anything ever written. Who the hell writes about scenery for seventy pages? Thirdly, I do feel like he's quite extraordinarily sensitive, our narator. Sometimes it takes him awhile to clue into things and he tells us all about that -- mostly as it relates to farm landscapes and gardens, for instance which flowers grow in which seasons, he only learned that after several years (who cares? and yet!) but he's alive to every detail of his surroundings, including human ones, and reads much significance into a man driving a certain car or a woman tying her shirt into a knot. 

(disliking the aesthetics of block quoting myself, but finding this otherwise to be visually confusing).

In the first section, I thought, it's like he's describing the writer's life with the writing cut out of it. What's left? Long walks in which the village is observed. Then, in the second of the five sections, he introduces the writer as a young man setting off from Trinidad for England, and explains how his character became fractured -- too influenced by colonialist writerly ideals to allow for his own experience to be important, his life and his idea of himself as a writer were at odds, and so he had two parts of himself: his life and his ideas, off in separate directions. So, that seemed like a pretty great novelistic play to me -- first get me to wonder, where is the rest of this man, this writer who seems empty, and then talk about how he became empty. One thing I was uncertain about is that he goes on to say that he became whole again, seemingly prior to the period of his life in which he's walking on these country roads looking at these flowers and trees. Anyhow, I was very taken by the idea and manifestation of this fracture.

The main character exists but almost doesn't exist. He lives somewhere but for the first fifty pages we have no idea why or how he came to be there. Then he reveals that he is a writer, which explains partly, by inference, how his life seems to consist entirely of going for long solitary walks near Stonehenge. We still don't know why he's living there, but given how lost we were before, it feels like a big advance. Also, characters who we know are important from the way he stresses them, get sick and die before the narrator's done more than said a friendly hello when they drive past him on his long solitary walks. So how are they important? This is the suspense born of the strange writing style, which sounds unsuspenseful but hooked me.

With some books it's hard not to think of them as somewhat autobiographical, and I always try to refrain from that. Here, it's almost impossible not to think of this as writing from the author's life. It's another way in which it resembles A la recherche. Partly it is the lack of character exploration -- creating the character appears not to have interested the author, allowing the inference that he doesn't feel interested because he already knows himself so well. In any case, as this unfocused entry must make apparent, the book caused me to reflect at length on many large themes. If you can do that without character or plot, then why employ either of those tired old narrative stratagems? But I hope I've also explained why I would be careful about who I recommend the book to: it's a slow read and nothing happens and the wondrous insight will be missed if the reader doesn't very carefully sift through all the details of garden fences and rose bushes. However, I will read more Naipaul in the near future.