Version of Pastoral

Christopher Ricks

  • The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections by V.S. Naipaul
    Viking, 318 pp, £10.95, March 1987, ISBN 0 670 81576 4

The Enigma of Arrival: V.S. Naipaul’s title is the one at which Apollinaire enigmatically arrived, for the painting by Giorgio de Chirico. A detail of it illuminates Naipaul’s cover and his book: making their huddled way from a classical quayside (the scene bathed both in shadow and in sun), two stoled figures have their obscured faces towards us and their backs to a wall. Above the wall billows the sunlit summit of a sail.

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