the enigma of arrival movie review

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Review: “The Enigma of Arrival” is a Darker Take on the Coming of Age Story

With a premiere at 2018's Busan International Film Festival, Chinese indie film "The Enigma of Arrival" offers a darker take on coming-of-age.

By Richard Yu , 7 Oct 18 04:42 GMT

The Enigma of Arrival opens much like any other coming-of-age film—a group of wayward boys tries to impress some girls with antics on a motorcycle. One of these girls, Dongdong (played by Gu Xuan), becomes the center of their attention. Like most wayward boys, the male characters in Enigma try to convey their “coolness” through contempt towards authority. They break school rules, talk back at their teachers—and steal diesel from a local gang to buy a new motorcycle.

This last act of defiance is where this otherwise normal coming-of-age story takes a darker twist. After uncovering the theft, the local gang beats up the boys and threatens to do so again, unless they can pay them back for the diesel. The boys decide to take the offensive though, and burn some ships that belong to the gang.

Upon their triumphant return, however, the boys discover Dongdong’s bag left a bench, with Dongdong nowhere to be found. The rest of the film then walks back through the events of that night, from the different perspectives of each of the boys.

Described by director Song Wen as highlighting “how life can be crushed by lies,” The Enigma of Arrival is filled with suspense and drama—not that kind that will have you on the edge of your seats, but the kind that will make your heart sink when the tragic events that shatters its characters’ carefree youth are revealed.

The Enigma of Arrival uses night and day to capture mysterious events and their ultimate revelation, respectively. Furthermore, it leverages the contrast of the bleak, colorless scenes of life in an impoverished village to emphasize the depression that the boys go through when they lose Dongdong, against more colorful scenes set in a Japanese restaurant when the truth of what happened to Dongdong is finally revealed.

Ultimately though, The Enigma of Arrival is a darker take on the coming-of-age story. Instead of featuring the lively highlights of youth, and disappointing—yet ultimately harmless—heartbreaks, it shows how a series of adolescent mistakes can cause lifelong consequences.

The Enigma of Arrival —China. Dialog in Mandarin Chinese. Directed by Song Wen. Running time 1hr 52min. First released October 2018. Starring Gu Xuan, Li Xian, and Liu Wei.

The Enigma of Arrival had its world premiere at the 2018 Busan International Film Festival .

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Busan Review: ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ is a Dreamy Dramatic Thriller

As China is set to take over North America to become the single largest film market within the next years, more attention will/should be paid to its formidable and ever-expanding supply of home-grown talents. With the world premiere of his debut feature The Enigma of Arrival in Busan, the spotlight is on writer/director Song Wen, best known for founding the Xining FIRST International Film Festival which, for its celebration of non-mainstream films and emerging filmmakers, is sometimes referred to as the Chinese Sundance.

This background is telling, for Song’s approach to this multiplex-friendly, nostalgia-laced dramatic thriller is not without arthouse aspirations. And while it ultimately doesn’t meet some of its loftier goals, it’s a surprise nonetheless to find such dreamy, strikingly sensitive tone in an essentially commercial picture.

The film opens with an intriguing sort-of prologue. The thoughtful, weary voice of narrator San Pi (Liu Weibo) describes a conflict-ridden reunion with his childhood buddies, shown in a quick succession of shots at a spa resort intercut with b&w flashbacks and splashes of mystically colorful imagery. Led by San Pi’s musings on living a life between fiction and reality, the movie then goes back in time to the early 90’s where we meet not just the bespectacled, slightly awkward San Pi, but also the rest of the original gang: Da Si (Lin Xiaofan), Xiao Long (Li Xian) and ringleader Fang Yuan (Dong Borui).

All four go to the same high school in a harbor town along the Yangtze. But instead of actually going to school, they hang out, chase girls, go to shady theaters that would stop the Wong Kar-wai at midnight to start their pornographic programming. There’s some confused tension when both Xiao Long and Fang Yuan fall for the same girl Dong Dong (Gu Xuan), but overall the boys seem to be doing a fine enough job wasting their precious youth. Serious trouble only comes when they messed with the wrong guys and, one thing leads to another, end up burning down a ship. On that same fateful night, Dong Dong goes missing.

The “good ol’ yesteryear” has been a major selling point of many recent Chinese box office hits. Often seen in contrast to the somewhat obscene collective affluence of China today, those threadbare, “simpler” times communicate an innate goodness and inspire melancholic reminiscence with great potency. Song plays the nostalgia card hard using prominent pop culture references and affectionate portrayals of wild adolescence from the pre-digital age. But he also does it with care and real tenderness, never letting this homage to a bygone era become something garish or cheap. Most importantly, the way he frames this story with two distinct time periods also serves narrative purposes. In many ways, Dong Dong’s disappearance marks the loss of innocence of the boys. And Song makes sure you notice that. When we see them again that many years later, they’re forever changed – just like everything else.

The Enigma of Arrival shares some thematic similarities to Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s Cannes sensation Burning . In both cases, a missing girl from an ambivalent love triangle causes uncomfortable truths to come to light. But while Lee’s is an artfully conceived almost-noir executed with brutal minimalism, Song’s version is much more focused on the crime element itself. Exactly what happened to Dong Dong would be revealed and, accordingly, all the rage, shame, denial and guilt felt by the brothers falls neatly into place. By leaving no question unanswered (explicitly and unequivocally), the film is no doubt made more accessible, even if the sophistication and subtlety of the storytelling are also compromised somewhat.

While no one quite stands out, the young cast is capable and functions well as an organic whole – with Li and Gu showing most on-screen charisma as two star-crossed lovebirds. The interchangeably color/monochrome photography by Li You is yummy. The way he captures small-town life in 90s China, breezily unkempt with an endearing sense of spontaneity, beguiles in particular. Award-winning editor Yang Hongyu, whose past work includes Angels Wear White , Berlinale winner Black Coal, Thin Ice and John Woo’s Red Cliff , delivers another hit. It’s through her poetically rhythmic yet always clear-eyed cuts that the movie, with its genre construct and dramatic undertones, came together.

Song Wen is a skilled filmmaker and, even for his first feature, you can tell he aims high both in commercial and artistic terms. One does wish he’d trust his instincts for the latter more. Among the many differences it would have made is possibly ending the film just a beat earlier, on the heartbreaking shot of a face caught in slow motion from a beautifully edited flashback scene, instead of yet another narrated bit making sure you understand something that doesn’t necessarily need explaining.

The Enigma of Arrival screened at the Busan International Film Festival.

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The Enigma Of Arrival

Song Wen’s film combines a naturalistic depiction of young people’s lives in China with intriguing crime drama…

The Enigma of Arrival depicts the hedonistic, tearaway lives of a gang of four guys living in a grimy urban environment on the banks of the Yangtze river. These lives are thrown into disarray when the girl the guys have been chasing mysteriously vanishes in circumstances that raise suspicions about two members of the gang.

Chinese director Song Wen provides an entertaining and engaging film, with some great, artistically shot scenes capturing the boredom and desires of the young men. But the material, with its complex plotting and numerous twists, seems to have somewhat overwhelmed him so that the story is not quite as well told as it could have been.

Kim Se-in interview: “I think the film wraps up my 20s”

The film spends a long time at the start establishing the characters of the four guys and the nature of their lives. There is Xiao Long (Li Xian), a good-looking guy who appears the most charming of the group, and the more punkish Fangyuan, who wants to be a gangster and goes around causing trouble and picking fights. Then there is Dasi (Borui Dong), who initially seems a bit stupid but is actually the most sensitive of them, and Wuyi, a lazy waster whose brother owns the restaurant where the group spend much of their time.

These early scenes, recounting the boy’s youth are full of nostalgia. They show the friends battling the boredom of their lives by flirting with girls, drinking, and visiting the local cinema. Such scenes are some of the best in the film, shot with a naturalness and overflowing with energy. They convey the boys’ hunger for new experiences – imported music, Hong Kong movies, or dates with girls.

From the start, the film really immerses us in these young mens’ world and makes us understand the way which they experience things. A nice scene, for example, shows three of the guys going to the small, shabby local cinema. Aggressively telling some other men to get out of their seats, they sit and speak the lines of the movie along with the characters, waiting for it to pass midnight when the guy running the place can put on something more pornographic. In their depiction of how young men kill time, these scenes reminded me a lot of the Taiwanese film The Boys From Fengkuei .

But while in that film the boys are only involved in a few scuffles, the youths in The Enigma of Arrival find themselves caught up in criminal activity and violence that proves to be much more than they bargained for. It is while they are trying to get out of this situation that Dong Dong (Gu Xuan), the beautiful girl they had all been lusting after, disappears.

This disappearance (which is somewhat Murikami-esque in nature) unsettles each of the boys’ lives. Xiao Long, believing that he was the one who Dong Dong had really loved the most, embarks on a quest to try to find her. Meanwhile, Wuyi, who had met with Dong Dong just before she vanished, finds himself accused of her murder by the local police.

Song Wen tries, in the second half of the film, to show how each of the guys sees their own relationship with Dong Dong and her disappearance differently from the others – exploring the subjective ways in which we each perceive reality. This might be the reason for the film’s English title, which seems taken from a book by V.S. Naipaul in which he also reflects on the nature of our perceptions of our surroundings.

Whilst this deeper stuff in the film is interesting, Song Wen leaves us a little confused about what exactly he is trying to say. However, the portrayal of the way in which each of the friends assumes a role for themselves and others and none of these assumptions prove to be entirely correct does add an extra element to this plot. Like The Boys From Fengkuei this film is really about the relationship between the four friends, but it takes this relationship to a much darker place, showing how misunderstandings pull the boys apart.

In doing so , The Enigma of Arrival produces some really strong, if slightly inconsistent, performances from those playing the four central characters. Li Xian is particularly good as Xiao Long, showing how this character gradually becomes obsessed and is driven almost crazy by the disappearance of Dong Dong. His emotive performance in this role helps to drive the story along after the mystery has been established, making us join in his desire to resolve the case. In general, The Enigma of Arrival kept me gripped as it moved along, building up to a dramatic encounter between the four friends.

Whilst not everything in The Enigma of Arrival succeeds, it is good to see a Chinese film trying to do something more ambitious than the endless poorly plotted rom-coms and action films that are being churned out at the moment. This film combines a naturalistic depiction of young people’s lives in China with an engaging crime/mystery drama in a way that is well worth watching.

Playing at the Busan International Film Festival on Friday 5 th , Monday 8 th , and Tuesday 9 th of October 2018.

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Review of ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ by Song Wen

Dominique Musorrafiti | October 29, 2020 May 12, 2019 | China Movies Database , Featured , Chinese Cinema

Four friends meet again after many years at a private dinner in a Japanese spa resort in China.

Related articles: The Enigma of Arrival technical details , Interview with Song Wen, director of The Enigma of Arrival , biography, and filmography of Song Wen

Review by Dominique Musorrafiti

During their youth, in the 90s, Xiaolong, Fang Yuan, Da Si, and San Pi shared a passion for motorcycles and girls. In that period they had become friends with Liu Xiaomei and Dongdong, the latter a promising young athlete who had particularly struck their attention for her beauty.

Their days alternated between moments of leisure at the cinema, at the restaurant, at the disco, between light-heartedness, idleness, and micro-crime to escape a bit from everyday life. The four after stealing diesel from a local gang to get money for a new motorbike, begin a downward spiral.

“The Enigma of Arrival ( 抵达之谜 ) is the debut movie of director Song Wen , co-founder and president of the FIRST International Film Festival, an independent film festival in China.”

Tussle and revenge with local criminals lead them to burn a ship and that bond that held them together deteriorates on that same night.

Jealousies begin to weigh and when Dongdong mysteriously disappears their friendship takes such a turn that it will not be able to return.

Xiaolong, unlike the others, after years fails to give himself peace and continues to look for clues to the disappearance of the young girl.

Critic review

The Enigma of Arrival is a drama thriller where a series of wrong decisions inexorably write a path of life for the four main protagonists. Among them, the one with a predetermined destiny turns out to be Xiaolong, who has no possibility of choice, since he is faced with facts already happened, of which he is for a long time unaware.

At some point in the plot, the viewer, as well as Xiaolong, finally get to know what really happened to Dongdong, but it turns out that this is not the fundamental point of the story.

The plot is interwoven on individual and subjective perspectives, between past and present. The extremely personal points of view are the cause of the lack of communication between the four friends.

The characters have different perspectives and perceptions of what happened. The search for truth seems complex because each of them sees their relationship with Dongdong, and her disappearance in a unique way. Exploring the subjective ways in which everyone perceives reality, everyone has their own version of events.

“Yang Hongyu, the editor, also worked with Wang Xiaoshuai, Vivian Qu, Zhang Yang, John Woo”

If everyone has their own truth, no reality is worth more than the others for others. The sequences of memories exploding like a broken prism offer the viewer the ambivalence and nature of points of view, of what surrounds the four friends.

The fragments formed by the various pieces of memory of each are dramatic elements in the plot since none of them taken individually is complete to lead to an understanding of what happened.

The disappearance of the young woman is the cause and the breaking point of their “friendship”.

The errors of adolescence bring consequences for their whole life. They are therefore marked and changed forever because the secrets destroy.

“Everyone filters down memory to his own benefit” San Pi

This tortuous psychological labyrinth shows how the misunderstandings move them away.

Their friendship and their lives are ruined by lies, prejudices, and a good pinch of clueless naivety and immaturity.

While others choose to forget to move forward, Xiaolong, obsessed and upset, has not forgotten and stubbornly continues for years to look for Dongdong, to know what really happened.

The shots of the first meeting of the four friends with the two girls in the little shop where cassettes, CDs and VCD are sold, infuses the spectator who knows the China of these time, or the fans of Chinese cinema of that decade, a sense of deep melancholy and nostalgia.

“Four friends, a girl, bad decisions, personal perspective, a disappearance: an enigma!”

Poster for the movie "The Enigma of Arrival"

A dip in that period when young people, from the pre-digital and social era, hungry and thirsty for new experiences, used to put themselves in those shops looking for imported products – music and films – from Hong Kong, from all over Asia, but also from the West.

The sequence of scenes from the disco, where Xioalong and Fang Yuan compete for Dongdong’s attention, with the alternation of colored shots brings to mind the atmosphere of Wong Kar-wai .

The director is also explicitly mentioned, through the image of a poster of “ Days of Being Wild “, when the group of friends goes to a small cinema waiting for special midnight porn. Cinematographic quotations still continue, with young friends reciting the lines of a Chow Yun-fat monologue during the screening of “ A Better Tomorrow ” by John Woo .

The film is set in a port city on the banks of the Yangtze River, but the themes of friendship, love, desire, revenge, hatred, envy, misunderstanding, guilt, and obsession are universal.

Everything that happens to the protagonists triggers emotions and feelings that everyone may have felt, at the time of the loss of innocence. This characteristic brings the viewer closer to the vicissitudes of the characters.

“Life is floating between fiction and reality like a prism which can create fiction and reality tinted by different colors” San Pi

Interview with Zhang Yang: Up the Mountain

Interview with song wen, director and co-founder of first festival in china, leave a comment cancel reply.

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The enigma of arrival.

Directed by Song Wen

Long, the main character, spends his youth wandering with his three best friends from high school. With the emergence of a woman, Dongdong, whom they all fall in love with, their friendship begins to fray. One day, Dongdong suddenly disappears in an ambiguous situation, and the friendship ends. After many years, the friends meet again. However, just as youth cannot return, they can only confirm that their friendship cannot be restored.

Li Xian Xuan Gu Dong Borui Lin Xiaofan Liu Weibo

Director Director

Writers writers.

Song Wen Richeng Tao Zonglei Li Lian Duan

Cinematography Cinematography

Alternative titles.

The Shape of Memory, Di da zhi mi

Thriller Mystery Drama

Releases by Date

05 oct 2018, 31 jul 2020, 13 sep 2021, releases by country, south korea.

Premiere 釜山电影节

114 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Jack Russo ★★★

Opening two minutes speak to something lyrical through an introspective emotional resonance, but the sensibilities of what follow could not be more brash; a 90s-set Lou Ye-throwback on delinquent youth, prone to the reckless abandon of impulse until this aesthetic of handheld ennui has to reckon with the consequence of its actions. The entanglement with riverside gangsters proposes a crime beat though its register is entirely erosive, disassociated from its potential as a thriller in order to draw lines across the mutuality of friendship and the divergence of individuals when their subjectivity struggles to align with accepted truths. The heavy troubles of such inflict an emotional lethargy far from the organic breeziness that had preceded it, increasingly obsessive until past claims present even once Song Wen returns to the opener's timeline; a mystery where what has been lost and found is all a matter of perspective.

Review by Willy 3

Days of Being Wild who's wong kar-wai?

throwback 90's lou ye film with half the pace of a lou ye film. local delinquent gang of highschoolers with no school in sight begin hanging out with some girls, which unfortunately coincides with them getting in over their head beefing with a whole fleet of gangster fishermen. it's all set in a fishing village with a large chunk toward the end straight up set on a docked ship. the premise to kick off the premise is corruption, with illegal shipping boats that use stolen oil & construction stuff over in shenzhen, so it's in line with all the other stuff dropping in that vein, including lou ye's own in the same year (this…

Review by ben ★★★

kinda strains under its own ambition while trying to appease two different sensibilities of art-house and melodrama without really hitting either hard enough

still has the great, rough appeal of a first feature and some beautiful, but some might say derivative, cinematography

Review by OVID.tv

After many years, a group of high school friends reunite. They have not seen each other since the disappearance of a girl they all secretly fancied. The circumstances of her disappearance caused the end of their friendship. Although time has passed, it is yet to be determined what exactly happened during those crucial years, and it seems this murky past is finally catching up to them.

“A dreamy and dramatic thriller.” —The Film Stage

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The Enigma of Arrival Reviews

The Enigma of Arrival is a darker take on the coming-of-age story.

Full Review | Jul 8, 2019

The Art of Redemption: V. S. Naipaul’s “The Enigma of Arrival”

This essay appears in the Fall 2018 issue of Modern Age . To subscribe now, go here .

With the death of V. S. Naipaul last August, it becomes more important than ever to reflect on his significance as a writer and critic of contemporary civilization. As Naipaul told me at a conference on postcolonial fiction at the University of Tulsa, he was “not like the others” reading their works that day. He was, indeed, not like the others, as his complex novel The Enigma of Arrival makes clear. That novel has nothing to do with the narrow interest in identity politics that suffused the fiction of his time. With his death, one can appreciate all the more clearly Naipaul’s difference and the great testing of courage and faith that are at the heart of all that he wrote.

The Enigma of Arrival is a compelling treatment of one of literature’s perennial themes: man’s recognition of his mortality and his discovery of the spiritual resources to cope with that knowledge. In this it is a profoundly traditional work of art, one that can be compared with the classic works of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Tolstoy, and Mann. What is original in Naipaul’s novel is the presentation of the discovery of faith against the backdrop of a contemporary culture within which enduring truths have increasingly come to be dismissed. It is at once a familiar rendering of a universal spiritual journey and a strikingly original treatment of that journey in the midst of a radically faithless era.

The autobiographical novel recounts a period in the life of a narrator who is largely indistinguishable from Naipaul. It is important, however, to recognize that Naipaul’s intention was not to write an intimate account of personal matters but rather—as he said of his earlier attempt at autobiography in A Way in the World —to create a “character who has roughly my background” and who would record “stages in one’s evolution.” [1] That approach had little to do with what Naipaul elsewhere termed the “quirks” of life: the comings and goings of acquaintances, the reception of one’s work in the marketplace, or the details of the author’s personal life.

Yet certainly the protagonist in Enigma is a version of the author: As in the novel, the real-life author moved to a cottage in Wiltshire in late 1970s (Teasel Cottage on the estate of Wilsford Manor). As in the novel, Naipaul at the time was recovering from a serious illness (bronchial pneumonia). And as in the novel, after more than a decade at Teasel Cottage, Naipaul moved to a dairyman’s cottage in nearby Salterton, a rustic dwelling he converted into a habitable abode.

In the novel, the death of a younger sister, corresponding to Naipaul’s sister Sati, precipitates the narrator’s spiritual crisis and creative blockage. In real life, it was not just Sati’s death but that of his younger brother Shiva as well that led to Naipaul’s extraordinary contemplation of mortality. A successful author in his own right, Shiva passed away three years before the publication of The Enigma of Arrival .

Enigma is focused quite strictly on a single thematic concern: man’s determination to pursue the truth, and thereby restore justice, in the face of illness, emotional suffering, and advancing age. The narrator’s life might best be regarded as a projection of the impossible ideal of total discipline and fidelity to art that the author wanted to follow but, given the limitations of spirit and flesh, did not succeed in achieving. At its core, the enigma that Naipaul unravels is a realization of human weakness—made all the more painful in the case of an artist of great talent and ambition—and the consequent discovery of spiritual realities of a much higher order than that of human ambition.

The redemptive quality of the novel is implicit in its title, borrowed from an early surrealist painting by Giorgio de Chirico, who in turn had borrowed the phrase from the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. The narrator of Naipaul’s novel states that upon seeing the painting for the first time he immediately felt that the title “referred to something in my own experience.” [2] With its depiction of an ancient Mediterranean seaport, as the author interprets it, the painting suggests to the narrator the story of a man who loses his way but finds redemption, but only toward the end of his productive life.

As a moral bildungsroman, The Enigma of Arrival proceeds from the waning of life recorded in the first section, entitled “Jack’s Garden,” to a troubling sense of flux in “The Journey” and reflections on the past in “Ivy” and “Books,” to the paradoxical arrival at rebirth in the final section, “The Ceremony of Farewell.”

“Jack’s Garden” portrays the mental life of a writer burdened by a sense of decay and impairment. He is not so much “at work” at this point as struggling to find a path back to his work, and as such he is preoccupied by an overriding sense of stasis. All about him life seems stalled or in decline. The titular garden, so well-tended while the estate gardener, Jack, was alive, is now overgrown and all but indiscernible. Jack had imposed a sense of order that the author perceived as “traditional, natural, emanations of the landscape, things that country people did.” With Jack’s death, this illusion is dispelled. Neither Jack’s widow, who soon moves away, nor any of his neighbors on the estate care anything for what he had created, and Jack’s garden quickly goes to seed. The order that Jack imposed is not merely something that “country people do” but an act of love emanating from Jack himself. The narrator comes to realize that Jack had understood, as the narrator does now, “how tenuous, really, the hold of all these people had been on the land they worked and lived in,” and he discovers “with something like religion” in “life and man . . . the true mysteries.”

At this point, Naipaul’s pilgrim sees much, but not the entire truth. “The bravest and most religious thing about [Jack’s] life,” he tells us, “was his way of dying: the way he had asserted, at the very end, the primacy not of what was beyond life, but life itself.” Occurring near the beginning of the narrator’s residency at the manor, Jack’s death is a seminal event in the novel, one that the narrator returns to again and again in an effort to comprehend his own mortality, but it is not one that immediately confers a full measure of understanding.

The second part of the novel flashes back to the period before the author’s arrival at the manor cottage, including his travel from Trinidad to England on a university scholarship, his stay in a London boardinghouse, his fruitless attempts to adapt the British novel of manners to his needs, and his flirtation with Angela, the Italian boardinghouse manager (corresponding in real life to the Maltese manager of the Earl’s Court boardinghouse where Naipaul stayed before going up to Oxford). This section has everything to do with the protagonist’s quest for acceptance in his adopted land. Nothing comes of his efforts at this point, in part because he lacks the “more direct, less unprejudiced way of looking” that he gains as a mature writer. At this early stage, he is not really seeing England as it truly is. Having lived with a fantasy for so long, he is like the Spanish in the New World, who see only gold or evidences of gold without perceiving the true riches that exist before their eyes.

The force of will that has buoyed the narrator’s rise from colonial schoolroom to Oxford scholarship to publishing success is associated here with the broader conundrum of modern civilization, in particular with its illusion of perfectibility and attendant amplification of pride and ego. In his preoccupation with “arrival” driven by sheer will, the narrator has been drawn into a dangerous state of mind that is all too common in our era: a condition of relativism according to which, as Alasdair MacIntyre has written, “all evaluative and normative judgments can be no more than expressions of attitude and feeling.” [3] Under this assumption, society is reduced to an “emotivist culture,” a culture that Naipaul captures perfectly in Enigma with his depiction of the delusional pride of Brenda and Les, the estate managers who succeed Jack; the artistic fraudulence of the landlord; and the self-indulgence and betrayal of Michael Allen, the young businessman whose short-lived affair with Brenda leads to her demise, and other characters. While these corrupt figures are contrasted with the more reflective ones of the narrator and his double, Jack, they also represent a milieu into which the narrator might well have sunk were it not for the novel’s culminating action of redemption. Brenda and Les in particular stand for the realm of unreflective physicality that appears so often in Naipaul’s fiction, a condition that the author associates with his childhood in Trinidad and with the developing world generally. What may not be so well appreciated is the extent to which he finds this form of raw materialism replicated in societies like Britain and the U.S. as those societies lose sight of their traditions and values.

At this point in the novel, as he approaches the crisis resulting from the unexpected news of the death of his sister, the narrator has still not grasped the full reality of his condition. Like so many around him, he is forcing his way through life on the strength of will and ego. Much of this false self-assurance consists of what MacIntyre sees as the relativistic confidence of modern culture in its drift from one cultural premise to another. As one who assumes he possesses, in MacIntyre’s words, the “ability to understand everything from human culture and history, no matter how apparently alien,” [4] Naipaul’s narrator shows signs of becoming extraordinarily modern and rootless, since “there is no such scheme of belief within which such an individual is able to find him or herself at home.” [5] This alienation manifests itself as a cynical relativism in which the subject views reality as insubstantial, impermanent, and pointless, precisely the terms in which Naipaul wrote of his youth in Trinidad and his life at Oxford and in London. It is not surprising that the narrator’s creative efforts in Enigma have stalled. By his modernist reckoning, given its assumption of the interchangeable quality of cultures, all his sacrifices for art are bound to be forgotten soon after his death, and indeed before death. This being the case, why make the effort? Again, Jack’s example enters into the narrator’s thinking.

From this willful and self-reliant condition, Naipaul’s protagonist suffers a profound humbling as he is sickened and brought to the threshold of madness and death. He is then miraculously restored to life and elevated to an appreciation of possibilities beyond any he could have previously imagined. Like the seemingly doomed figure of the Arthurian knight Gawain, the mythic figure of redemption with whom the author was much preoccupied at the time, Naipaul regains his way only after and as a consequence of a willingness to risk all in the service of truth. It is not just the Gawain myth but the entire tapestry of culture and society of the West of England that grounds the narrator’s reflections. As the postcolonial critic Jasbir Jain points out, the narrator’s development is contrasted not just with the failed examples of Brenda and Les but also with the vision of terror and chaos depicted in a Doomsday painting in nearby Salisbury’s Parish Church of St. Thomas Becket. [6] As the writer endures disillusionment, anxiety, and depression, he is led to revise his conception of his purpose on earth and the nature of the world in which he lives. In the end his life is transformed, and he is empowered to proceed with confidence.

Enigma plays out against the backdrop of postwar Britain from 1950 to 1985, a period of British history marked by economic decline and social disarray. At one point the narrator recounts his arrival and first months spent at a London boardinghouse during which he is cast among an assortment of impoverished immigrants and where he is befriended by the flirtatious boardinghouse manager, a woman who later reappears as a blowsy middle-aged figure awed by Naipaul’s success. London may be a great cosmopolitan center and the historical capital of a vast empire, but Naipaul’s initial experience of it was that of a collection of decaying rooming houses occupied by a doubtful collection of improvident individuals. In place of the Britain of his dreams, a place of learning, decorum, and wealth where he would soon join the ranks of established writers, he faces a deeply unsettling postwar milieu in which the barbarians seem to rule.

As Naipaul wrote in “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” one of his most revealing autobiographical essays from the period of his residence at Wilsford Manor: “The new politics, the curious reliance of men on institutions they were yet working to undermine, the simplicity of beliefs and the hideous simplicity of actions, the corruption of causes, half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made: these were the things that began to preoccupy me.” [7] In place of the educated Englishmen he had expected to meet, men and women engaged in creative, scholarly, and professional endeavors of the highest order, he encounters only tired novelists from an earlier era or second-rate journalists publishing uninspired work as a means of bare survival. The great civilization he had hoped to join and serve seems to have collapsed from within. As Naipaul noted in a 1998 Paris Review interview: “It is in a bad, bad way in England. It has ceased to exist.” [8] The seemingly impossible task of restoring the ideals of that civilization from the limited resources of his own experience and education falls on Naipaul himself.

It is not just the scruffy migrant neighborhoods of London that distress the new arrival. His years at Oxford prove equally disheartening. In place of a single-minded devotion to learning, Oxford offers what strikes the narrator as a middling education amid a cliquish atmosphere that excludes scholarship students like himself. All of Britain, it seems, has degenerated into the squalid, instinctual, self-centered conditions that Naipaul finds in the boardinghouse, and while the focus is on Britain, there is enough of New York and continental Europe in the novel to confirm that the decay is more widespread. The Western civilization in which the narrator had been educated and on which he has pinned his hopes seems to have disintegrated sometime before his arrival, leaving him as among the few defenders of a moral order that appears not to wish to be defended.

Buttressed against this decline is the writer’s unshakable faith in the ideals of Western civilization. Even as his contemporaries in Britain and America scorn their precious cultural legacy, that legacy continues to manifest itself both in the institutions of law and society and in the cultural monuments that remain. As Naipaul once stated at a UNESCO conference: “All old civilizations are superior to younger ones. That is why I have been happiest in Shropshire.” [9] That statement, which is echoed in Enigma in the narrator’s love of Wiltshire, was likely misunderstood by many in the audience. It is not a blind adherence to tradition that Naipaul promulgates but an objective evaluation of the importance of inherited belief systems and the difficulty of regaining equally compelling systems of order once they are lost.

Southwest England is an appropriate setting for this narrative of death and rebirth. Within a short walk from the manor cottage lie Stonehenge and nearby Winchester Castle, one of many locations associated with the legendary site of King Arthur’s court (as it is in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur ). There could be no better location in which to explore the narrator’s “sense of antiquity,” his “feeling for the age of the earth and the oldness of man’s possession of it.” It is not surprising that when asked about the qualities he most admired, Naipaul replied: “Honour (where it is personal, rather than the code of a class or group); reliability.” [10] Those are enduring virtues of an old civilization, as opposed to the self-indulgence and excess masquerading as tolerance and personal freedom that many contemporaries might prize.

Given the scale of decline in the postwar era, the narrator’s journey toward redemption in Enigma is slow and difficult. In part this is because, like all heroic questers before him, he is necessarily uncertain of his way. It is a dilemma that Naipaul has recounted many times: the expectation that as a writer he had only to adopt contemporary literary models relevant to his own experience and proceed from there, only to find that, within a modern civilization that has scorned traditions of faith and liberty, none exist. Only by great effort and after many false steps can he fashion an aesthetic that responds in an honest and uncorrupted manner to the modern world.

In this regard, it is crucial to recognize that Naipaul’s originality has less to do with his colonial background, a culture that he indeed considers empty and uninformed, than it does with his discovery that the cosmopolitan center itself has rejected its cultural inheritance. Although it produced the comic masterpiece A House for Mr. Biswas , Naipaul’s interest in colonial experience per se was relatively short-lived and resulted for the most part in lesser works such as Miguel Street , The Mystic Masseur , Guerillas , and A Flag on the Island . His later works, including A Bend in the River and The Enigma of Arrival , deal to an equal or greater extent with the relinquishment of authority on the part of those who originate from the cosmopolitan center. Critics have often taxed Naipaul for his supposed attachment to imperialism and all that this is meant to suggest, while in fact Naipaul’s later works emanate from a profound disenchantment with the moral and spiritual condition of Britain and America and with representatives of the West who as high-minded “saviors” of the downtrodden reintroduce their corrupted ideals to the colonial setting. Nowhere is this distress more evident than in The Enigma of Arrival .

One small incident illustrates the pervasiveness of decline. Returning from his river walk to his cottage, the narrator encounters two German “vandals,” as he perceives them to be, removing rotted logs from the ruins of Jack’s walled garden. The incident is especially disturbing because it epitomizes all that has happened in contemporary Britain. Jack’s garden, itself only a makeshift effort to retain a semblance of order, has been abandoned by his successors, those caretakers like Brenda and Les who are guided by the prospect of short-term gratification and by the tawdry fantasies that define what form that gratification should take. Now, with the arrival of the vandals, the nadir has been reached as Victorian enterprise has been reduced to base scavenging on the part of two itinerant youths of foreign descent. The incident moves the narrator to voice an impassioned lament over the loss of “the great days of the manor”—a time when “ideas of beauty and workmanship” reigned, not the instinct “to hasten decay, to loot, to reduce to junk.”

Significantly, the narrator does not blame the vandals themselves for this demise but the educated class, those tasked with wielding authority but who lack the will to act. Imperial Britain, which once ruled a vast colonial realm, had instilled an ideal of civilization both at home and abroad, but now Britain seems to have devolved into an enervated society of loutish and uneducated citizens, and the colonies have long since gained their independence, often, at least in the short term, to their detriment. It is a process that the narrator perceives taking place not just in Britain but in nearly every developed country: failing to cherish their patrimony, these societies discard their ancestral inheritance. Everywhere he looks, the narrator sees evidence of a relinquishment of authority and a resultant debasement of character. A series of female servants hired by the manor’s housekeeper, Mrs. Phillips, proves to be unfailingly incompetent and emotionally unstable. A particularly distasteful development is that the estate’s holdings are gradually sold off and enclosed with barbed wire, thus depriving not just the owner but the narrator and others of free enjoyment of the land.

One might expect that the narrator, a man who “had lived with the idea of change,” would stoically accept these changes, but in fact the selling off of the land, combined with his growing awareness of his own mortality, engenders an intense sensation of grief. The novel’s final section, “The Ceremony of Farewell,” recounts the greatest crisis of Naipaul’s life, as in his early fifties he is overwhelmed with thoughts of death and suffers severe depression. It is here apparent that “Death and the way of handling it,” not just the personal fate of one individual but the survival of civilization, is the controlling theme of this complex novel. The event that propels the narrator out of his melancholy and back to the effort of writing is the death of his younger sister. Returning to Trinidad for the religious ceremony following cremation, the narrator connects the many strands he has worked over for decades since his departure from Trinidad on a university scholarship. He finds that he is much closer to the end than to the beginning of his life. Incapable of beginning anew, as he had done before following a series of false starts, he must accept the damage that time has wrought.

For nearly a decade the narrator has resided at the manor cottage, which has fulfilled his need for quiet, privacy, and order, and his daily walks have restored his emotional and physical health. His sense of connection with the Salisbury plain has buttressed the appealing illusion of order. Ultimately, however, the narrator must face the fact that all earthly existence is radically imperfect. (The German vandals’ ransacking the ruins of Jack’s garden are a perfect trope for this condition.) His residence at the manor estate is a temporary one, just as Jack’s had been; his “garden” of literary creation is subject to neglect and ruin, even as Jack’s modest effort had been. One’s productive period as a writer is limited to a half century or so at best. His physical existence, like that of all human beings, is brief and uncertain. How does the narrator or any human being confront these daunting facts? Ultimately, the enigma is that life cannot be redeemed by way of the escapism of Brenda’s lurid fantasies or even Jack’s noble exertion of will. What is required is grace, and with it nothing less than the extraordinary feat of acceptance on the part of man.

At the end of Enigma , the narrator is shown “life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men, the grief and the glory.” That statement, from the penultimate sentence of the novel, is followed by an even more remarkable assertion: that at the very moment of facing the reality of death, the author’s soul overflowed with new life. At that moment he “laid aside my drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast about Jack and his garden”—beginning, in other words, the novel he has just concluded with this affirmation of a purposeful and benevolent order of creation.

To appreciate fully the importance of this moment, one must consider the extraordinary depth of Naipaul’s dedication to writing. From the age of eleven Naipaul was certain he had been marked as one who would achieve literary success, and when success first arrives, with the composition of A House for Mr. Biswas , the transcendent joy of writing transports the writer to a higher plane of being. As he recalled in his foreword to the 1983 reissue of Biswas , “nothing had prepared me for the liberation and absorption of this extended literary labour, the joy of allowing fantasy to play on stored experience, the joy of the comedy that so naturally offered itself, the joy of language.” [11] It is that level of joy, in effect a perception of the meaningfulness and order of creation, that Naipaul has regained in the composition of The Enigma of Arrival . But what both the real-life author Naipaul and his fictional persona gain is more than a resurgence of creative power: it is a step beyond the triumph of Biswas and a discovery of an order of creation beyond the individual powers of the artist.

The true enigma lies in the “exchange” that always exists between triumph and loss, success and failure, freedom and constriction. Thinking of his lost childhood, the narrator recognizes he has found a “second, happier childhood as it were, the second arrival” that brings a fuller perception of the beauty of creation. While it would be inaccurate to characterize this engagement in Judeo-Christian terms, it is clear that the transformative moment the narrator is describing is the response of a religious sensibility to the presence of illness and death. Moreover, the sudden transformation that the narrator recounts, immediately shifting from deep despair to the sort of creative labor he identifies with life, indicates an underlying spiritual rebirth. Rather than face defeat at the hands of death, he finds that his appointment with death ennobles and inspires him. As in the Gawain myth, his encounter with mortality is not the destruction it had seemed but instead the true fount of being. Having faced down the fears he “had been contemplating at night, in my sleep,” he now gains a full measure of life.

What emerges in the novel’s final section is the picture of a human being who faces his personal mortality and the potential demise of his civilization not just with courage but with the support of a redemptive faith. The Enigma of Arrival is a work that refuses to surrender to the deathly culture that encircled Naipaul during the quarter century in which he contemplated its composition. It is a work of art that meticulously records an aging author’s doubts concerning his personal health and the future of “a world in decay,” and one that finds a way forward in a blazing moment of redemption. Now that Naipaul is gone, the grand trial that he recounted in The Enigma of Arrival becomes all the more affecting. V. S. Naipaul was an author of great courage and vision, and his greatest accomplishment was a profound understanding of the necessity of faith and tradition in the face of a pervasive cultural decline. ♦

Jeffrey Folks taught for thirty years in universities in Europe, America, and Japan.

[1] V. S. Naipaul, “The Art of Fiction,” interview by Jonathan Rosen and Tarun Tejpal, Paris Review 154 (Fall 1998), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1069/v-s-naipaul-the-art-of-fiction-no-154-v-s-naipaul.

[2] V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 98. All references in the text are to this edition.

[3] Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice, Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 343.

[4] Ibid., 385.

[5] Ibid., 395.

[6] Jasbir Jain, “Landscapes of the Mind: Unraveling Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, ” Journal of Caribbean Literature 5.2 (2008): 115–24.

[7] V. S. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” Literary Occasions: Essays , ed. Pankaj Mishra (New York: Knopf, 2003), 162–80.

[8] Naipaul, “The Art of Fiction.”

[9] Quoted in Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (New York: Knopf, 2008), 403.

[10] French, The World Is What It Is , 404.

[11] V. S. Naipaul, “Foreword to A House for Mr. Biswas ,” Literary Occasions: Essays , ed., Pankaj Mishra (New York: Knopf, 2003), 134.

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The Enigma of Arrival

The New Yorker , August 11, 1986 P. 26

Memoir by a Hindu Indian who was born and raised in Trinidad in the West Indies. He always thought he was a writer, but didn't have the appropiate background. In 1950, when he was 18, he received a scholarship to Oxford. For a month before school began, he lived in a boarding house in London where he met a young woman, Angela. Angela managed the boarding house, and became the source of his fantasies and writing. He returned to Trinidad after 6 years, and saw the island and his family in a different light. Tells about how his writing progresses. He's commissioned to write a travel book about Trinidad. Certain of its success, he sells his house in England, and plans on travelling to Central America and the States--thinking the advance for the book will be his means of support. He receives a telegram saying that the book is not what the publisher wanted and there will be no advance. In spite of this, he goes to America. Tells about his other travels, the various places he's lived in England. He finally achieves success as a writer. Ends with a letter from Angela, whom he has not heard from in 20 years. She's saddened, and looks upon the boarding house years as the best. She wants to see him. He decides not to answer her letter. (The title of this short story is from the title of a painting by de Chirico; the poet Apollinaire gave the painting its title.)

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The Enigma of Arrival

Di da zhi mi.


	1 hr 54 min
	¥4 000 000
	$3 002 045 February 20, 2020

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A review of The Enigma of Arrival by VS Naipaul

Neither memoir nor story, the descriptive detail is fine, but it lacks any overall movement, is slow going and painful to read, and ultimately leaves the reader with nothing more than a brief impression of the mental state of the narrator and a very detailed understanding of a single cottage, a single manor, and single place. .

Reviewed by Magdalena Ball

The Enigma of Arrival by VS Naipaul Picador, 2002, pb Originally published by Penguin 1987 ISBN 0-330-48715-9

Nobel Prize winner VS Naipaul is well known for his statements about the “death of the novel” – his criticisms of plot, character and a forward moving narrative structure. His recently re-released 1886 book, The Enigma of Arrival, which he labels a ‘novel,’ proceeds with very limited plot, characterisation and a structure that takes it form much more closely from memoir and even diary writing than a formal narrative. That the work has been widely praised is certain. The dust jacket contains gushing accolades from no less than Anthony Burgess, Bernard Levin and Jan Morris. Although the writing is richly descriptive, it is hard to see The Enigma of Arrival as a novel at all, but rather a self-indulgent account of a short period of Naipaul’s own life. Of course all novelists take their material partly from their own life, but Naipaul never refines this vision of his into something universal, never pulls together anything more than the most internally focused and concurrently self-aggrandising and depressing vision.

There are 5 chapters, or “sections” as Naipaul describes them. The second section, “The Journey” follows Naipaul as he leaves Trinidad for England for the first time. The final section, “The Ceremony of Farewell” is really an epilogue, although much of the book reads like an epilogue. The other sections take place in a small Wiltshire village during a period where the narrator rented a cottage, worked on a number of other books, and had a serious spell of illness. During this time he observed, from the detailed perspective of an outsider, the people, and natural world around him. The narrator himself is so obviously and clearly Naipaul that it is impossible to see him as a character, and although we find out much about him through his first peron observations, there is little of formal development of this person aside from these impressions. We know little about his life in between his travel from Trinidad to England and his later stay in Wiltshire. It is as if the reader were being asked to rely on our understanding of Naipaul’s own body of work, referred to, his unwritten biography and his considerable reputation to understand who this narrator is.

As the narrator’s contact with the people around him remains cursory, we don’t really get to know any of the other characters either, except in a very superficial sense. We hear a little gossip, and learn much about the clothing they wear, but aside from a few rather cliched surmises by the narrator, we learn almost nothing. Jack, a man with a whole chapter dedicated to him, is a quaint farm labourer, wont to work with his shirt off and devoted to his garden until his health fails. The descriptions of Jack’s features, his waxen face, his clothing and his connection to his plot are some of the best pieces of writing in the book, but we see it as a passing observation by the only real character – the narrator:

“His eyes were far away. It was his eyes, oddly obstreperous, oddly jumpy, that gave him away, that said he was after all a farm worker, that in another setting, in a more crowded or competitive place, he might have sunk. And the discovery was a little disconcerting, because (after I had got rid of the idea that he was a remnant of old peasantry) I had found in thatbeard of his, a man with a high idea of himself, a man who had out of principle turned away from other styles of life.” (29-30)

Other characters are equally glossed over, with detailed surmises about who they are and how they see the world taken solely from the clothing they wear, the manner in which they walk or talk, and the odd greeting or bit of news. There is Brenda and Les who provide a bit of local colour and even some minor plot material with Brenda’s scandal and sudden murder, but all we know of them is this:

“And that took some understanding, that people like Brenda and Les, who were so passionate, so concerned with their individuality, their style, the quality of their skin and hair, it took some understanding that people who were so proud and flaunting in one way should be prepared in another corner of their hearts or souls or minds to go down several notches and be servants.” (70)

One begins to learn more about the prejudices of the narrator with each character who joins the reminiscence but ultimately the characterisation of the Phillipses, Brenda and Les, Pitton the gardener, the landlord, Bray and the failed writer Alan (who at least gets some degree of dialogue and his own voice) is no more in depth than one of those games you play on a bus or at a cafe where you look at a person and try to guess their lives and motivations by their clothes and manner.

The natural world is well described, in great detail and often beautiful prose:

“The river curved here. On the opposite bank the down ended abruptly in a wooded cliff, giving a great depth, and a hint of surrounding forest, to the river colour. There was also a new channel here from the bare down, a spring breaking out of the chalk and quickly turning into a noisy cascade. So that again, in this neat, tame, smooth landscape, with a bare green-white down and with a river a few feet deep divided neatly into numbered beats, there was a reminder of the unpredictable force of water.” (226-7)

I suspect that this may be the main source of the praise for this book. The prose moves very slowly and the narrator gives this single piece of the world such detailed attention, viewing it from a number of different seasonal angles, rendering it, like an impressionistic painter, in different hues and at different times of the day. So much detail though, without sufficient characterisation becomes more a kind of catalogue of botany – heavy, dull and difficult to wade through. Although the narrator takes some delight in his natural world, the overall effect is of lassitude – of a kind of personal ennui, which it is impossible to avoid feeling as a reader. This is compounded by his own stated melancholy, which permeates the book:

“…I began to be awakened by thoughts of death, the end of things; and sometimes not even by thoughts so specific, no even by fear rational or fantastic, but by a great melancholy. This melancholy penetrated my mind while I slept; and then, when I awakened in response to its prompting, I was so poisoned by it, made so much not a doer (as men must be, every day of their lives), that it took the best part of the day to shake it off. And that wasted or dark day added to the gloom of preparing for night.” (375)

The more interesting theme, of displacement – of trying to find a new home and acquiring belonging could have lifted this work out of the morass of self-indulgent reflection into the universal, creating a good story. This is certainly touched upon in “The Journey” section, which seems to have little connection with the rest of the book. The importance of this theme is hinted at by the book’s title, and the “Enigma of Arrival” painting by de Chirico which inspires Naipaul:

“My story was to be set in classical times, in the Mediterranean. My narrator would write plainly, without any attempt at period style or historical explanation of th eperiod. He would arrive…at that classical port with the walls and gateways like cut-outs. He would walk past those two muffled figures on the quayside. he wouldmove from that silence and desolation, that blankness, to a gateway or door. He would enter there and be swallowed by the life and noise of a crowded city…” (106)

The book would be a meditation on the journey of life, on death, on the dislocation of travel and exile and how we recreate those places in our own images. Presumably this “novel” The Enigma of Arrival , the very work he is talking about writing, is the work itself. With a decent unifying story, and the kind of characterisation which Naipaul is certainly capable of, it could have been a powerful piece of work. As it stands, The Enigma of Arrival, never quite comes together as the surreal and beautiful tale of a traveller. It is too self-obsessed. Too much a portrait of the artist as a young and then old man and very internally focused. There is too much pastoral, too much surmising about other people without actually letting us get to know them, and finally too much subjectivity to allow the richness of the theme to develop. We certainly feel the sadness of the narrator, and we clearly see, in great detail, what he sees as he walks out day by day, speaks to a few people, observes change, but we never realise anything more than that. Things appear, bloom and decay, and people appear, bloom and decay. Britain too has begun to decay, and indeed the narrator is also decaying.

For true fans of VS Naipaul, this book forms an important biographical piece of his work. If you aren’t familiar with Naipaul however, this is not a book I would recommend. Neither memoir nor story, the descriptive detail is fine, but it lacks any overall movement, is slow going and painful to read, and ultimately leaves the reader with nothing more than a brief impression of the mental state of the narrator and a very detailed understanding of a single cottage, a single manor, and single place.

For more information on The Enigma of Arrival visit: The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel

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The Enigma Of Arrival Reviews

1 hr 54 mins
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The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections - V.S. Naipual (1987)

This review was originally published on Goodreads. I have adapted it here with minimal modification.

Over the course of five sections, The Enigma of Arrival draws an autobiographical portrait of an unnamed narrator that strongly resembles the author. Like Naipaul, the narrator is ethnically Hindu, raised in Trinidad, and schooled in England. He recounts his life on a decaying country estate near Salisbury, Wiltshire. Most of the novel focuses on the characters that populate the manor and the changes that the manor undergoes while the narrator lives there. This narrative is supplemented with recollections from the narrator’s life as an immigrant and young writer.

The Enigma of Arrival finds Naipaul in a sentimental mood. While the narrator’s voice retains much of the hardness that characterizes Naipaul’s other works, it also demonstrates a wistfulness about the past and the setting in which the narrator presently finds himself in.

Naipaul is a tough novelist. He is hard on his characters. He assesses them bleakly, even cruelly. Sometimes the line he takes towards his characters seems to be a mask for himself. Naipaul doesn’t easily give himself up to scrutiny.

And yet, in The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul makes plain the thematic thrust of the novel. The narrator describes the life of Jack—the central force of the novel, a man who lives, and soon dies, in a nearby cottage, and who tends to a garden that enchants the narrator:

All around him was ruin; and all around, in a deeper way, was change, and a reminder of the brevity of the cycles of growth and creation. But he had sensed that life and man were the true mysteries; and he had asserted the primacy of these with something like religion. The bravest and most religious thing about his life was his way of dying: the way he had asserted, at the very end, the primacy not of what was beyond life, but life itself. (93)

Naipaul digs into the theme of growth and creation by lushly describing the natural world in Salisbury: its seasonality, its bounty (epitomized by Pitton’s garden), and the human artifacts that destabilize and pollute it. He also returns to a theme found in his other novels: the formative power of the world. Naipaul sees the individual as shaped by the world from which he emerges. Naipaul draws out the notion of differing worlds by sketching the distinctions between the New World, from which the narrator emigrates, and the Old World, where he currently finds himself. The narrator sees himself as an oddity in rural England because his formative world differs so greatly from his present setting. He is “a man from another hemisphere, another background” (15).

In the world, to Naipaul, one must assert themselves. In his middle age the narrator thinks of death and is consumed with melancholy. He is so afflicted by this melancholy that he is “made so much not a doer (as men must be, every day of their lives)” (343). The parenthetical thought, a seeming throwaway line, is Naipaul’s worldview in its essence. It is expressed at the beginning of A Bend in the River : “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” Elsewhere in The Enigma of Arrival , the narrator laments a life that lacks self-assertion: “Her life had repeated; she had lived the same life or versions of the same life. Or, looking at it another way, almost as soon as it had begun, her life of choice and passion had ended” (78).

Unfortunately, the thematic richness and the richness of the prose is let down by poor pacing, a fact that becomes especially apparent in the last hundred pages. By Naipaul’s own admission, during the composition of the book, he set “aside his drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast” (354). It’s not apparent that he edited the book with the same vigor. Still, this only slightly detracts from the better qualities of this meditative and essayistic novel.

The Enigma of Arrival Summary

by V.S. Naipaul

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The Enigma of Arrival is a creative autobiography by Naipaul in which he explains his life in five sections. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Naipaul rose as a novelist before moving away from his homeland for a life in Wiltshire, England. There, he lives in a cottage in the English country. The account offers poetic descriptions of that land, noticing its timelessness.

But after years of working on a novel, his time in the country changes as he has changed. When he realizes how utterly normal the land really was, he contemplates his own broken perception, adding layers of himself onto his perception of reality. The question is raised again about timelessness, but when he looks for something eternal, all he sees are the people in their busy, intricate lives.

Eventually, his life takes him to New York City where he lives for some time before moving again to Oxford. His perspective broadens with each new snapshot into a different piece of human life. He sees society as an intricate dance, the costume of which changes in different places.

In a semi-fictional account, Naipaul describes his time living with his landlord, a jazz-age socialite. In real life, it was Stephen Tennant.

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The Enigma of Arrival Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Enigma of Arrival is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for The Enigma of Arrival

The Enigma of Arrival study guide contains a biography of V.S. Naipaul, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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The Enigma of Arrival (2018)

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Review: ‘Arrival’ is deeply human, expertly realized science fiction

Kenneth Turan reviews ‘Arrival’ directed by Denis Villeneuve, starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma, and Mark O’Brien. Video by Jason H. Neubert.

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You can stop watching the skies.

They’re here.

Movies that begin with confounding aliens on the loose have been around for awhile (at least since 1951’s “Man From Planet X” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still”) and they invariably share a family resemblance even if the space visitors themselves never look the same way twice.

Where do these beings come from, baffled scientists and frightened government officials inevitably want to know. Are they friendly or hostile, what do they want from us and what are they doing here in the first place?

One of the most satisfying things about Denis Villeneuve’s elegant, involving “Arrival” is that it is simultaneously old and new, revisiting many of these alien-invasion conventions but with unexpected intelligence, visual style and heart.

Working from a smart and effective script by Eric Heisserer adapted from a cerebral short story by science-fiction luminary Ted Chiang, the French-Canadian director and his team have found ways to make these way-out-of-the-ordinary events seem plausible and convincing.

This cannot have been easy because Chiang’s story, though containing a splendid central idea, is a cool, scientific, even philosophical exploration of the nature of language and does completely without many of the plot specifics that make “Arrival” involving.

Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker star in “Arrival.”

Always an effective, if at times coolly manipulative director (“Sicario,” “Prisoners”), Villeneuve and his team have embraced the script and even found space for emotion. This is especially true in the film’s audacious conclusion, a moving, nervy reveal sure to spark lots of after-movie conversation.

In his success Villeneuve is helped considerably by the finely calibrated performance of star Amy Adams. Though the credits list her as one of a group of top actors including Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker and Michael Stuhlbarg, “Arrival” is really Adams’ film, a showcase for her ability to quietly and effectively meld intelligence, empathy and reserve.

Before we know anything else about her, we see Adams’ Louise Banks as a parent, enjoying the happiness and the sadness that can come with raising a child, her daughter Hannah. Chiang’s short story is titled “Story of Your Life,” and “Arrival” is similarly structured as a kind of message from mother to child.

Almost immediately, however, we cut to the chase. Banks is a professor of linguistics, but when she shows up to teach, her classroom is almost empty. A timely look at the television tells all: an ominous extraterrestrial spacecraft has landed in Montana and the country is freaking out.

Looking like the universe’s largest skipping stone, or a surfboard big enough to daunt Duke Kahanamoku, that spacecraft is one of 12 that have shown up at apparently random locations around the globe, including Venezuela, Siberia and China.

Banks thinks all this has nothing to do with her, but she’s wrong. Because she’s an ace linguist who already has security clearance, the Army’s all-business Col. Weber (a letter-perfect Whitaker) shows up at her door in need of help figuring out both how the aliens speak and what they are saying.

Whisked off to deepest Montana, Banks is joined by another scientist, top Los Alamos theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Renner), and Agent Halpern (Stuhlbarg), the inevitable watchful guy from the CIA.

Every 18 hours the alien craft opens and Banks and Donnelly and a support crew go in and confront the pair of aliens, who they nickname Abbott and Costello (a big improvement over the short story’s Flapper and Raspberry).

Banks’ mandate is double-edged: to learn as much of these creatures’ language as she can, while for security reasons, not revealing any more English to them than she needs to.

This process turns out to be a more fraught procedure than the linguist imagines, and not only because in the rest of the world everyone is acting on pure fear alone.

But for Banks, whose sessions with the aliens are punctuated by frequent visions of herself and her daughter, learning that alien tongue, as short-story writer Chiang puts it, “changes the way she understands her life.”

While Chiang’s story provides “Arrival’s” essential core concept, almost everything else is brought to the table by Villeneuve and his accomplished team, led by gifted cinematographer Bradford Young (“A Most Violent Year,” “Pawn Sacrifice,” “Selma”).

Almost taking as a challenge the familiar nature of alien movies, Villeneuve, Young, production designer Patrice Vermette and visual effects supervisor Louis Morin have taken it as a challenge to show us things from unexpected angles, keeping us off balance visually and emotionally in a very accomplished way.

Adams’ contribution is essential to this plan, especially when you realize that the story is in large part about the nature of language learning and linguistics. Her ability to create empathy and emotional connection, with the audience as well as the aliens, reminds us that the best and most effective science fiction is invariably deeply human at its core.

MPAA rating. PG-13 for scenes of science fiction violence and terror and for brief language.

Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.

In general release.

Critic’s Choice. “Arrival.” Amy Adams stars in this elegant, involving science fiction drama that is simultaneously old and new, revisiting many alien invasion conventions but with unexpected intelligence, visual style and heart. - Kenneth Turan

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Arrival, film review: Finally a sci-fi thriller that doesn’t rely on action movie clichés

Amy adams carries denis villeneuve's cerebal and contemplative hit, article bookmarked.

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Denis Villeneuve is currently working on the next Blade Runner movie starring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford. His new film Arrival (a premiere in Venice this week) is also a sci-fi movie, albeit a very cerebral and contemplative one. The film, based on cult sci-fi yarn Story Of Your Life by Ted Chiang, starts with a War of the Worlds -style alien invasion. Its plot, though,turns out to be more preoccupied with linguistics, philosophy and non-linear time than with humans in boiler suits zapping the creatures from outer space.

The main protagonist Dr Lousie Banks ( Amy Adams ) is a brilliant academic. In a deliberately dream-like and confusing prelude which stands as a mini-movie in its own right, we see a montage of incidents from her life with her beloved daughter. Back in the present, she is teaching in a sparsely attended lecture hall when one of her students makes her turn on the new channel on TV. A dozen oval spaced alien spaceships have arrived on earth. They’re hovering everywhere from Devon to the Black Sea. World leaders have no idea whether the spaceships have come in peace or with murderous intentions. Louise is recruited by the military authorities alongside scientist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to try to communicate with the visitors.

The film is fascinating in its own slow-burning way as it depicts Louise’s painstaking efforts to come up with a set of language conventions that the aliens can understand. The “heptapods” are spidery creatures with starfish-shaped hands who communicate through their own incredibly complex form of hieroglyphs. They create inky patterns of circles and symbols that look elements from Jackson Pollock paintings. A jarring, minimalist score by Johann Johannsson adds to the general eeriness.

This is one sci-fi movie in which there is no attempt whatsoever to anthopomorphise the aliens. They’re not like humans. Louise is patient and dogged in her attempts to understand them but she has no time. Across the world, everywhere from China to Russia to Sudan, military forces are gathering, ready to try to blast the aliens back to the galaxy whence they came. In the wake of their arrival, the stock market has collapsed, looting is widespread and there is a very real danger that the superpowers, instead of joining forces to deal with their new visitors, will soon turn their weaponry on each other.

Amy Adams is a very versatile actress, equally adept at playing con artists and ingenues; in appearing in screwball comedy and in very dark drama. Here, she is utterly credible as the academic so passionate about her work that she hardly seems to notice that Armageddon may be nigh. This is a Hollywood movie in which semantics matter. The difference between “weapon” and “tool” is crucial for the future of humankind.

Early Oscars 2017 contenders

Villeneuve has assembled a strong supporting cast. Forest Whitaker is a furrowed-browed, no-nonsense US military Colonel, trying to get Louise to hurry up and crack the code that will enable her to understand the Heptapod language. Michael Stuhlbarg is the vaguely sinister intelligence chief type, ready to turn against Louise if he even suspects that she is compromising national security. They, and Renner’s scientist, are all subservient to Adams, who carries the movie.

Occasionally, when characters breathlessly utter lines about language and time being “not the same” for the aliens or we’re suddenly whisked into the past or future, the film can seem a little silly. It’s heartening, though, to encounter a science fiction thriller that is ready to deal with abstract ideas and that doesn’t rely on the slightest on action movie clichés.

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The Clues You May Have Missed Leading To Arrival's Temporal Twist

This post contains spoilers for "Arrival."

The mind-boggling twist in Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival" is more than just a shift in temporal linearity. In the film's opening scenes, we learn that gifted linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) has lost her child, Hannah, to an unspecified illness. After Louise is brought in as a translator for the alien Heptapods — along with a team of experts, including mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) — a whole new world of linguistic perception begins to unravel. Due to her empathetic attempts to communicate, Louise is gifted with the ability to experience her past, present, and future all at once, shattering the traditional human perception of sequential events. It is revealed that the scenes with Hannah take place after Louise meets the Heptapods , and her husband is none other than Ian, her research partner.

The surprising aspect of the twist is not confined to the emotional ramifications of experiencing the future, no matter how bleak or heartbreaking it might be. "Arrival" hinges on the beauty and terror of communication, its ability to change the course of the world, and how dangerous misinterpretation can be when language becomes a barrier. Every corner of the world comes up with ways to communicate with the Heptapods, but the results vary from painting a benign picture of humanity to etching an irresponsibly violent one. The Heptapods' ability to experience time without constraints evolves into a mode of communication in itself — this gift bestowed upon Louise feels transcendent, as she is treasured by a species for inventing a mode of communication that cleverly encapsulates the complexities of human experience.

Vanity Fair spoke to "Arrival" production designer Patrice Vermette and set decorator Paul Hotte in 2017, and they broke down the visual clues strewn across the film that lead up to the profound twist in question.

How time becomes a mirror in Arrival

As the different points in Louise's life blend after she experiences the temporal break, Vermette used mirrored interior settings to convey the cohesion that bleeds through her existence. Her home, where we see her spend time with Hannah, her classroom, and the spaceship where she communicates with the aliens all resemble one another, and a white wall creating a distinct open-space partition is present in all three spaces. Vermette explained this design choice in further detail:

"You can see elements of the horizontal ship chamber where Louise communicates with aliens reflected in her house and in the classroom. All three have this big white wall representation — at her house, with the big glass window overlooking the hazy lake. In her classroom, you have her whiteboard. And the chamber is divided by the big glass window ... For Louise, the idea of the chamber was pre-conveyed in her world."

Texture was also used to convey a thread of continuation, as the line-patterned walls of the spaceship can be seen in her home and her classroom, hinting at a merging of timelines and the influence that the arrival of the Heptapods had on her immediate surroundings. According to Hotte, the intent was to convey a sense of interconnectedness, along with the vast depths of wisdom that the alien race assimilated over time, proven to be too multi-layered and complicated to be transmitted via our rudimentary understanding of language alone .

Once you notice these visual clues, which follow an almost circular, ouroboros-like pattern, "Arrival" reveals itself as an even more deeply considered and profound film about the best and worst aspects of humanity in the face of the unknown.

'Loki' Season 2: Trailer, Release Date, Cast, Plot, and Everything We Know So Far

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When and where is 'loki' season 2 coming out, watch the trailers for 'loki' season 2, who's in the confirmed cast of 'loki' season 2, what do we know about the plot of 'loki' season 2, who's making 'loki' season 2.

Loki Laufeyson, the Asgardian "God of Mischief" based on the Norse deity, is perhaps the most beloved anti-hero character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe . Loki initially made an appearance as a villain in the 2011 film Thor as the adoptive son of Odin and adopted brother of the superheroic God of Thunder. Despite being introduced as an enemy, Loki evolved into a beloved character whom fans couldn't help but adore. In 2021, Loki finally got a series focused entirely on his mischief, set right after the Battle of New York in the MCU, almost ten years after his initial debut. The first season of the Loki series amassed a huge following and the popularity of the series, which stars Tom Hiddleston as the title character, was more than reason enough to keep it going. The six-episode series ended on a cliffhanger that foreshadowed the upcoming season and formally introduced the idea of the Multiverse to Marvel fans, mixing fantasy, mythology, space, and time. The second season of Loki will be part of Phase Five of the MCU and is expected to be more creepy and terrifying than the last one. So here's everything you need to know about Loki Season 2.

Editor's Note: This article was last updated on November 4, 2023

Loki, the God of Mischief, steps out of his brother's shadow to embark on an adventure that takes place after the events of "Avengers: Endgame."

Loki Season 2 premiered on Disney+ on October 5 at 6 PM Pacific Time . Head writer of the first season, Michael Waldron , signed an overall contract with Disney in January 2021 that included his involvement in Loki's second season. A mid-credits sequence in the first season's finale, which was released in July 2021, announced the second season right after the first one ended. Loki Season 2 was expected to debut in the Summer of 2023 , according to Kevin Feige , President of Marvel Studios, who made the announcement during San Diego Comic-Con 2022, though that plan has obviously changed. The new season is a part of the MCU's Phase Five, which began on February 17, 2023, with the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania . Season 2 has been quite a success already with the premiere alone bringing in over 10 million views in just three days .

Watch on Disney+

Loki Season 2 was among the various shows discussed during Disney's D23 Expo from September 9 to September 11, 2022. Marvel shared a bit of information on the show with Kevin Feige, revealing that Loki is still trying to make sense of everything following the shocking Season 1 ending. Recently, Disney+ revealed a few seconds of footage from the season in their trailer for 2023, which you can see above.

We got our first trailer for Loki Season 2 on July 31. The series is set to deal with the ramifications of Season 1 and the post-credit scene from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania .

On August 14, we also got some new footage from Loki Season 2 from an unlikely source: McDonald's. The footage is included in an ad introducing McDonald's "As Featured In Meal". See the whole video in the player below or skip to the 43-second mark if you just want to see the Loki footage.

A 30-second spot was released on September 4, highlighting Loki time slipping throughout multiple different timelines and realities, both in the past and present, as well as teasing some of the new season's trippy visuals.

More recently, during the Walt Disney Studios Showcase at Destination D23, some footage from Season 2 Episode 1 was screened, which unfortunately hasn't been released to the public. The video reportedly picks up immediately after the cliffhanger ending of Season 1, with Loki arriving in a vastly different TVA from the one he remembers. Worse still, no one remembers him, which leads to the God of Mischief getting chased around the complex. Further mishaps ensue and Loki eventually runs into Casey, the nervous office worker from Season 1 with the drawer full of Infinity Stones. In a surprise twist, Loki glitches and finds himself in the same location, but with Casey now able to remember him. Suspecting some sort of time manipulation, Loki tells Casey to find Mobius before glitching out once again. On September 22, a thirty-second teaser for Loki Season 2 was released via X (Twitter). This was followed, on September 25, by a new Loki Season 2 featurette that spotlights the God of Mischief's long legacy as part of the MCU, with Kevin Feige talking about Tom Hiddleston's evolution in the role. See the featurette in the player below:

Another promotional clip for Loki Season 2 was released via X on September 27, followed by a new featurette on September 29. The featurette focuses on Ke Huy Quan 's new character, and you can watch that video right here:

loki-season-2-tom-hiddleston-sophia-di-martino-social-feature

Eight MCU characters were confirmed to return for Loki season 2 in Marvel Studios' D23 footage and Feige announced in May 2022 that the "whole cast" of the first season would return. It follows that viewers will get to see more of Tom Hiddleston as Loki, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Ravonna Renslayer , Tara Strong as Miss Minutes , Owen Wilson as Mobius M. Mobius, Sophia Di Martino as Sylvie, and Eugene Cordero as Casey/Hunter K-5E. Jonathan Majors could also appear as Kang the Conqueror, a variant of He Who Remains.

There are some new faces joining the MCU through Loki Season 2 as announced by the studio. Rafael Casal 's unnamed "important role" in the season was officially announced in July. Ke Huy Quan's ( Everything Everywhere All at Once ) casting as a Time Variance Authority archivist, who is also seen in the trailers, was confirmed in September. Kate Dickie ( Game of Thrones ) will also appear in an unspecified role in Season 2, speculated to be a villain. It is possible that other Marvel characters could feature in the series, or alternatively, their Variants could arrive to reinforce the Multiverse, given the crucial role Loki Season 2 plays in the establishment of the Marvel Multiverse.

Tom Hiddleston as Loki standing with TVA agents in ‘Loki Season 2’

The Season 1 finale left a lot of room for interpretation in Season 2. When fans last saw He Who Remains, he offered two options to Loki and Sylvie: kill him and watch as his variants destroy the Sacred Timeline, or let the timeline continue under the control of the Time Variance Authority. He was slain by Sophia Di Martino's Sylvie in retaliation for all the suffering she faced in her life, and it appears that this caused the MCU timeline to splinter into the multiverse , with Mobius stating that "63 new branches" appeared almost immediately. Tom Hiddleston has previously teased that Season 2 would be centered on "the war for the soul of the TVA."

It was somewhat anticipated that the collapse of the Sacred Timeline would have significant effects. When Sylvie pushes Loki through the time door after killing He Who Remains, Loki arrives at a Time Variance Authority where no one recognizes him. The God of Mischief will have a difficult time assisting this alternate reality TVA in finding a solution. The fate of the TVA personnel, who were all pulled from their timelines and forced to forget their previous lives, was similarly left for Season 2 to uncover. Additionally, Owen Wilson has confirmed that Loki Season 2 will go deeper into Mobius' story , potentially revealing his pre-TVA life, saying:

I thought I would have a good time but I really enjoyed it. I've been lucky working on a million movies and always having a good time but on that one, I had a really great time and that continued on Season Two. Maybe even moreso because we were filming in London and being there at Pinewood but yeah, [his story] just goes deeper.

One of the big scenes that has stood out in the trailers, is seeing Sylvie working at a McDonald's restaurant. A recent article revealed that the fast food restaurant's role in the series is just another excuse for production placement, but instead wanted to give Sylvie a "happy place."

Executive producer on the series Kevin Wright also teased what else fans can expect from Sylvie's arc this season.

“This character had been on a decades-long, maybe centuries-long revenge mission, and the classic trope of those stories is that it’s all-consuming and she’s not thinking about what comes next. Now she has this moment of opportunity, where is she going to go?”

Loki Season 2 is produced by Marvel Studios, with Eric Martin serving as head writer. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead lead the directing team, having previously directed two episodes of another Marvel Studios series, Moon Knight (2022). Michael Waldron, the head writer for the first season, and Tom Hiddleston return as the executive producers. Isaac Bauman is the cinematographer for the series and Natalie Holt has returned from the first season as the composer. The list of executive producers for Loki Season 2 includes Victoria Alonso , Louis D'Esposito , Kevin Feige, Tom Hiddleston, and Michael Waldron, as well as Stephen Broussard , Brad Winderbaum , Kevin Wright , and Kate Herron .

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COMMENTS

Review: "The Enigma of Arrival" is a Darker Take on the Coming of Age
By Richard Yu, 7 Oct 18 04:42 GMT. Courtesy of Fortissimo Films. The Enigma of Arrival opens much like any other coming-of-age film—a group of wayward boys tries to impress some girls with antics on a motorcycle. One of these girls, Dongdong (played by Gu Xuan), becomes the center of their attention. Like most wayward boys, the male ...
Busan Review: 'The Enigma of Arrival' is a Dreamy Dramatic Thriller
Busan Review: 'The Enigma of Arrival' is a Dreamy Dramatic Thriller. Zhuo-Ning Su October 7, 2018. As China is set to take over North America to become the single largest film market within the next years, more attention will/should be paid to its formidable and ever-expanding supply of home-grown talents. With the world premiere of his ...
The Enigma of Arrival
The Enigma of Arrival. List. Jul 8, 2019. Page 1 of 2, 2 total items. In Theaters At Home TV Shows. Advertise With Us.
The Enigma of Arrival (2018)
Xian Li (Zhao Xiaolong)Xuan Gu (Li Dongdong)Borui Dong (Fang Yuan)Xiaofan Lin (DAI Siwen)Weibo Liu (San Pi)Zonglei Li (WU Yi)Qiyan Zhang (LIU Xiaomei) Wen Song A friendship falls apart after the ...
Film review: The Enigma Of Arrival
Song Wen's film combines a naturalistic depiction of young people's lives in China with intriguing crime drama… The Enigma of Arrival depicts the hedonistic, tearaway lives of a gang of four guys living in a grimy urban environment on the banks of the Yangtze river. These lives are thrown into disarray when the girl the guys have been chasing mysteriously vanishes in circumstances that ...
Review of 'The Enigma of Arrival' by Song Wen
Four friends meet again after many years at a private dinner in a Japanese spa resort in China. Related articles: The Enigma of Arrival technical details, Interview with Song Wen, director of The Enigma of Arrival, biography, and filmography of Song Wen Review by Dominique Musorrafiti. Synopsys. During their youth, in the 90s, Xiaolong, Fang Yuan, Da Si, and San Pi shared a passion for ...
The Enigma of Arrival (2018)
The Enigma of Arrival. A girl's disappearance causes great turmoil for her friends. Page 1 of 6, 11 total items. The percentage of Approved Tomatometer Critics who have given this movie a positive ...
‎The Enigma of Arrival (2018) directed by Song Wen • Reviews, film
Synopsis. Long, the main character, spends his youth wandering with his three best friends from high school. With the emergence of a woman, Dongdong, whom they all fall in love with, their friendship begins to fray. One day, Dongdong suddenly disappears in an ambiguous situation, and the friendship ends. After many years, the friends meet again.
The Enigma of Arrival (film)
The Enigma of Arrival had its premiere at the Busan International Film Festival, October 2018. The film was released in China on July 31 in IMAX and 3D. It was originally scheduled to be released on Valentine's Day 2020, [4] but delayed to amid the Coronavirus disease .
The Enigma of Arrival
Verified Audience. Richard Yu Cinema Escapist. The Enigma of Arrival is a darker take on the coming-of-age story. Full Review | Jul 8, 2019. Rotten Tomatoes, home of the Tomatometer, is the most ...
The Enigma of Arrival
The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections is a 1987 novel by Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul.. Mostly an autobiography, the book is composed of five sections that reflect the growing familiarity and changing perceptions of Naipaul upon his arrival in various countries after leaving his native Trinidad and Tobago.. Most of the action of the novel takes place in Wiltshire, England, where ...
The Art of Redemption: V. S. Naipaul's "The Enigma of Arrival"
The Enigma of Arrival is a work that refuses to surrender to the deathly culture that encircled Naipaul during the quarter century in which he contemplated its composition. It is a work of art that meticulously records an aging author's doubts concerning his personal health and the future of "a world in decay," and one that finds a way ...
The Enigma of Arrival
The Enigma of Arrival. By V. S. Naipaul. August 3, 1986. The New Yorker, August 11, 1986 P. 26. Memoir by a Hindu Indian who was born and raised in Trinidad in the West Indies. He always thought ...
The Enigma of Arrival (movie, 2018)
All about Movie: directors and actors, where to watch online, reviews and ratings, trailers, stills, backstage. A friendship falls apart after the dis...
A review of The Enigma of Arrival by VS Naipaul
The Enigma of Arrival. by VS Naipaul. Picador, 2002, pb. Originally published by Penguin 1987. ISBN -330-48715-9. Nobel Prize winner VS Naipaul is well known for his statements about the "death of the novel" - his criticisms of plot, character and a forward moving narrative structure. His recently re-released 1886 book, The Enigma of ...
The Enigma Of Arrival
Check out the exclusive TV Guide movie review and see our movie rating for The Enigma Of Arrival
The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections
This review was originally published on Goodreads. I have adapted it here with minimal modification. Over the course of five sections, The Enigma of Arrival draws an autobiographical portrait of an unnamed narrator that strongly resembles the author. Like Naipaul, the narrator is ethnically Hindu, raised in Trinidad, and schooled in England.
The Enigma of Arrival Summary
The Enigma of Arrival is a creative autobiography by Naipaul in which he explains his life in five sections. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Naipaul rose as a novelist before moving away from his homeland for a life in Wiltshire, England. There, he lives in a cottage in the English country. The account offers poetic descriptions of that ...
The Enigma of Arrival (2018)
The Enigma of Arrival (2018) on IMDb: Movies, TV, Celebs, and more... Menu. Movies. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. ... User Reviews Review this title 0 Reviews. Hide Spoilers. Sort by: ...
Review: 'Arrival' is deeply human, expertly realized science fiction
Kenneth Turan reviews 'Arrival' directed by Denis Villeneuve, starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma, and Mark O'Brien. Video by Jason H. Neubert. You ...
Arrival, film review: Finally a sci-fi thriller that doesn't rely on
Denis Villeneuve is currently working on the next Blade Runner movie starring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford. His new film Arrival (a premiere in Venice this week) is also a sci-fi movie, albeit a ...
The Enigma of Arrival (2021) Movie
Download or stream The Enigma of Arrival (2021) with Gu Xuan, Dong Borui, Song Wen for free on hoopla. After many years, a group of college friends reunit… The Enigma of Arrival Movie on hoopla digital
David Lynch and Chrystabell review, Cellophane Memories: An enigma
David Lynch likes to say that "intuition is the key to everything". In his films, artwork and music, the 78-year-old auteur follows his instincts through loops of dream logic, baffling and ...
Clues You Missed Leading To Arrival's Sci-Fi Time Twist
The mind-boggling twist in Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival" is more than just a shift in temporal linearity. In the film's opening scenes, we learn that gifted linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) has ...
'Loki' Season 2
We got our first trailer for Loki Season 2 on July 31.The series is set to deal with the ramifications of Season 1 and the post-credit scene from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.. On August 14 ...

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Review: “The Enigma of Arrival” is a Darker Take on the Coming of Age Story

By Richard Yu , 7 Oct 18 04:42 GMT

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Arrival, film review: Finally a sci-fi thriller that doesn’t rely on action movie clichés