V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018)

A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul is one of the finest books I've ever read. With beautiful prose, dark humour, and an almost eerie gift for capturing personalities, I find it no surprise that Naipaul is a Nobel Prize winner, and that his books are beloved.

Mr. Mohun Biswas, whose parents emigrated from India to Trinidad, is a simple man in most respects. He is intelligent, a worrier, short of temper, with a non-stop commentary on how the world in general has wronged him. He begrudges his in-laws their home and takes no interest in the fact that they provide him with free board, and that they lessen his perennial penury. What Mr. Biswas wants more than anything is his own house, one that he owns, one where he can be king of the castle. He has no idea how to go about attaining his desire; he tries once, but has a house built so poorly, so inexpertly, that it falls down in the first wind and rain storm it encounters. The house is representative of Mr. Biswas's life - he is forever doing things in half-measures and failing to understand that without passion, he is never going to attain his dreams. His life, like his house, collapses in a series of mishaps which are mainly his own fault.

Mr. Biswas has opportunities. In turn, he becomes a pundit (a Caribbean usage of the word pandit, meaning Hindu priest), a shopkeeper, and a journalist, but with his sense of entitlement and deep-rooted ability to mess up everything he is given, his careers fail, his pocketbook suffers, and he and his family practically become itinerant, nomads of the desert of rooms and houses belonging to somebody else.

A House for Mr. Biswas succeeds because the title character, while feckless and annoying, deeply selfish and ungrateful, is also the underdog. Everybody cheers for the underdog. Even as we often despise Mr. Biswas and his actions, we keep hoping that next time he will succeed - his career will take a swing towards the positive; he'll be able to buy that house he dreams of. So we follow him, impatient with his mannerisms but still wishing him well.

What I in particular liked about this book was its slow pace. A brief side note here - I have always had difficulty reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, because his stories take forever to unfold. My daughter, who spent some time living in Latin America, really loves Garcia Marquez, because she says that the people in this overheated countries move slowly, get things done slowly, and so she understands the snail's pace of GGM, and loves his books the more for them. I think I may finally have understood what my daughter told me all those years ago. The employees at the newspaper where Mr. Biswas is employed go home for lunch and a long afternoon nap and return to work when the day begins to cool, because it's too hot to act in any other fashion. So the book is paced, taking longer than I usually like to explain things, because that's the way life unfolds in the tropics, turtle-slow and suffering the heat.

A House for Mr. Biswas entered that rare category for me: the instant favourite. It's in a class by itself, and I can't wait to read more of his novels.… (more)

Clearly for me, the best novel of Naipaul's I've read. Often allusive, meaning the reader must wait for situations and relationships to resolve themselves. Beautiful writing that illuminates the writer's serious attempt to look as honestly as he can at how his origins shaped the course of his first forty years. Naipaul's stance is that a colonial background and society will never fully allow its people to function as a thriving entity.
At the end the writer, as he sets down his memoir, sees a personal resolution in withdrawal from political and familial ambitions.
"It gives me joy to find that in so doing I have also fulfilled the fourfold division of life prescribed by our Aryan ancestors. I have been student, house-holder and man of affairs, recluse...
Yet I feel that in this time (his life to date) I have cleared the decks, as it were, and prepared myself for fresh action."
And so he did. This was Naipaul's second novel. Huge success for him was to follow.… (more)