Breaking the more or less chronological order here (I have so far disregarded the books on India and Islamic countries that were written between the sixties and the eighties, but do come to these later), I move on to three books published by Naipaul more recently: The Enigma of Arrival (1987), A Turn in the South (1989), and A Way in the World (1994). These, it seems to be generally agreed, present Naipaul's mature reflections on issues that have preoccupied him consistently from his earliest literary efforts. The three books in question can be seen to fit in systematically with the three areas that the present study has touched on already. The Enigma of Arrival arguably substantiates Naipaul's apprehension of England and his self-placement in relation to England (the mimicked culture, towhich and within which Naipaul, so to say, arrives); A Turn in the South revisits and confronts the issue of racialized thinking (writing about blackness and whiteness) in the context of the southern United States (the ‘authentic’ source of black civil rights and Black Power movements); A Way in the World returns to reflections on colonial and post-colonial history and the Caribbean. These books seem to me to be linked by their sense of retrospection, and by their self-conscious revisiting of themes which Naipaul had dealt with before. The return to previously discussed themes is not, however, merely a reiteration of observations Naipaul had made already. These books indicate an advance on his previous observations, usually by addressing the gaps and omissions which had been manifest in his earlier writings.

The Enigma of Arrival, scrupulously subtitled A Novel, is unambiguously presented as an autobiographical narrative: descriptions of the writer 's period of residence in a village near Salisbury, an isolated pensive time, intermittently give way to reflections on the writer 's past (in Trinidad, of course, and in England, and in all the other places he had visited) and creative efforts. The juxtaposition of the form of the novel with barely fictionalized autobiography is deliberate: for Naipaul both, it seems to be suggested, are made and apprehended in a continuous fashion. Naipaul's life self-consciously flows into his creative work and vice versa.