A House For Mr. Biswas

A House For Mr. Biswas
Author: V.S. Naipaul 1961 531 pp
My rating: 5*
Started October 18 2008, Finished October 26 2008.

Delights on almost every page. Of all the books I’ve read since I started blogging, this was the first one that I felt a tinge a sadness upon finishing -- I wanted more of Mehun Biswas and his family. A fair comparison to this book is the complete Rabbit quartet, as both works completely realize their protagonists, though Biswas achieves similar impact much more economically and Naipaul reveals his characters more from exterior traits and interactions than Updike does. The plot, the bulk of which runs from about the mid 1920s to the mid 1950s, takes Biswas, a Trinidadian Hindu of Indian extraction all the way from his inauspicious birth to his premature death at 46, thoroughly chronicling his lifelong struggle to assert himself as a unique and noteworthy individual, a quest symbolized by his attempts to acquire a livable house from himself, his wife and his children. Biswas undertakes many careers ranging from sign painter for which he has a natural aptitude, to shop-keeper for which he has little, to plantation-manager for which he has none before he finally finds his calling as a sensationalistic journalist. While Biswas’ life has at least as many valleys as peaks, the prevailing tone is comedic, though Naipaul’s skill in depicting the full range of emotions Biswas experiences can occasionally whipsaw the reader, as during the vertigo inducing change of tone from the desperation of Biswas’ nervous breakdown at the end of his time as the plantation overseer which is immediately followed the comedy of his days as a an intern reporter, endlessly recycling phrases from the old newspapers that had constituted the wall paper in his plantation hut. I also tip my hat to Naipaul for rendering a character as frequently unsympathetic as Biswas -- he his not above hitting his wife and his feelings for his children rarely extend beyond how their actions reflect upon him -- so completely and fairly that we come to understand and forgive his shortcomings and, in the end, have a fair amount of affection for him.

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… as a journalist he found himself among people with money and sometimes with graces; with them his manner was unforcedly easy and he could summon up luxurious instincts; but always, at the end, he returned to his crowded, shabby room. (45)

Living in a wife-beating society, he couldn’t understand why women were even allowed to nag or how nagging could have any effect … [Susila] talked with pride of the beatings she had received from her short-lived husband. She regarded them as a necessary part of her training and often attributed the decay of Hindu society in Trinidad to the rise of the timorous, weak, non-beating class of husband. (133)

Biswas, the novice reporter described by interviewee as an ‘incompetent, aggrieved and fanatical young report who distastefully noted my guarded replies a laborious longhand.” (295)

[Exam day] Altogether it was a dreadful day, a day of reckoning, with Daddies exposed to scrutiny on every side, and the examination to follow. (425)

So later, and very slowly, in securer times of different stresses, when the memories had lost the power to hurt, with pain or joy, they would fall into place and give back the past. (524)