Odyssey, Naipaul, and the Enigma manuscript

by Nicholas Laughlin on July 22, 2010

Odyssey Editions page for The Enigma of Arrival

Odyssey Editions web page for The Enigma of Arrival, showing a page from the manuscript in the Naipaul archive

The literary agent Andrew Wylie said on Wednesday that he would begin his own publishing venture, called Odyssey Editions, which will produce e-book editions of titles by some of his clients, including Saul Bellow, John Updike and Philip Roth.

Mr. Wylie said his new company would focus on older titles whose digital rights are not owned by traditional publishers. The books will be available exclusively at Amazon’s Kindle store for two years.

— So reports the New York Times. The announcement has caused a minor kerfuffle in publishing circles. Caribbean readers may be more interested to know that one of the titles released by Odyssey as an e-book is V.S. Naipaul’s “novel” The Enigma of Arrival. The elegantly designed Odyssey website includes an excerpt from the book’s opening chapter, an “author commentary” (drawn from Naipaul’s 1987 essay “On Being a Writer”), and images of two manuscript pages from the Naipaul archive at the University of Tulsa.

Actually, these are typescript pages, with Naipaul’s handwritten revisions. The original manuscript is in longhand, in a series of ordinary school exercise books. Your Antilles blogger can boast of having seen these — and indeed held them! — on a visit to the archive in 2007. Yes, my hands did slightly tremble.

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