The Mystery of Arrival

Author: (British) V.S. Naipaul
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
Features: The Mimic Men is autobiographical, as Naipaul transformed his own life into writing material. It depicts his great migration from Trinidad to England and his quiet life on an estate in the south of England with a colonial background, permeating the text with a deep love for the rural canyons. It is a story of a colonial resident who has taken root on the ancient land of the oppressor. The early works of Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, The Arrival of the Birds, are unremarkable but served as the inspiration for Naipaul's novel of the same name. According to him, it indirectly and poetically drew his attention to something in his own experiences. The traveler, the strange city, and the weathered life are the "arrival mystery" that the writer Naipaul found for himself. Naipaul takes a reconciliatory attitude toward the colonizers. Faced with the decline and abandonment of the countryside of the metropole, his brushwork is gentle yet tinged with sorrow. Here, the boundaries between the colonizers and the oppressed, the mainstream society and the ordinary laborers have blurred; he sees only weathered lives and hurried travelers. Thus, he admires the unrestrained and rugged lifestyle of the farmer Jack, shows tolerance toward the affected vanity of the gardener Booton in his dress and the weak mindset of pretending to be rich for the poor, sympathizes with the estate owner plagued by weakness and decay and his increasingly crumbling empire. But after all, he is an immigrant writer without roots. Due to his identification with the metropole, though he does not face the dilemma of the "homecoming," he still carries the alienation of the "outsider." His stance remains that of an observer, and his gaze is always detached.