A freestyle literary feast

The Enigma of Return

Thirty years later, Trinidad’s Nobel Prize-winning author, VS Naipaul, penned a masterful book, part-novel, part-autobiography, entitled, The Enigma of Arrival, musing on the shift in perception and slow-growing familiarity for the place of an exile’s landing as well as how our new surround influences and changes us.

Both of these works cast strong shadows across Dany Laferrière’s latest novel. Césaire is frequently referenced throughout the book; Naipaul passes without mention but his influence would seem a justifiable assumption, even beyond the appropriated and cleverly inverted title.