In her article “The House That Jack Did Not Build”, Elisabetta Tarantino wonders whether V.S. Naipaul’s subtitling of

, “a novel in five sections”, does not follow some “lucus a non lucendo” logic: “I’ll call it a novel because it is not: it is an autobiography” (Tarantino, 1998, 169). Indeed, engaging with this self-proclaimed novel, its readership cannot overlook the numerous parallels between Naipaul’s own history and that of the first-person narrator of the book, which are both marked by colonialism, exile, and the complications of a writing career striving to gain recognition in the U.K. even as it takes the colonial world as its main subject-matter. Obsessed with notions of inheritance and origins,

both fits a

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Citation: Munos, Delphine. "The Enigma of Arrival". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 September 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=956, accessed 25 November 2024.]