A House for Mr Biswas

During his 46 short years, Mr Biswas has always struggled to seek and define his sense of self but to no avail. A House for Mr Biswas is V.S. Naipaul’s gripping and satirical tragicomedy of errors which is quite reminiscent of Gogol’s portrait of harried and desperate characters. Early in life, Mr Biswas is proclaimed to be “born the wrong way and thrust into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen” and shuffled from one frail and crumblng house to another, from one set of relations to another, always threatened with instability and ridicule. Hence, Mr Biswas has attempted to be self-sufficient, carve out a modest living, and shape his own destiny away from the cloying purse strings and meddling influence of show more his treacherous in-laws.

During my frenzied reading, I felt my literary sensibilities bursting with such fervour. As an ardent bookworm, I have always associated the art of reading with the will to live, the desire and willingness to savour life’s bittersweet moments. Indeed, my reading hibernation ended with the gradual bloom of Spring. In fact, A House for Mr Biswas recalled to mind my Indiophile tendencies which had been laid to rest for quite some time. Through the sometimes comical, witty, and the quietly desperate Mohun Biswas, I found myself reclaiming something of myself. Indeed, the character of Mr Biswas felt like a kindred soul who, like me, has spent almost a lifetime carving out a distinct identity which struggles against calamitous and trivial events alike time and time again. show less

VS Naipaul's "A House for Mr. Biswas" is considered a classic by many literary critics. It is about a man who is frustrated up until the very end of his life.

When Biswas is born, a pundit tells his mother that the boy's life will be bitter and painful. As a child, he bounces around until he marries, almost by accident, the daughter of a wealthy and respected Indo-Trinidadian family. Biswas spends the rest of his life trying to live outside the shadow of that family, blaming everyone but himself for a never ending parade of failures that he actually creates.

Many of the characters created by Naipaul are reprehensible. There are wife-beaters and wives who accept beatings with pride. Biswas himself is childish with his attitude that the show more world owes him favors. He beats his own children and never seems to work until he stumbles into the job of a reporter for a national paper, a job he keeps for many years despite the editor knowing he plagiarizes, lies, and exaggerates.

The value in this book is the fascinating mixture of culture that exists throughout the Caribbean. Learning about the industry, customs, and ways of Trinidad is endlessly fascinating. Unfortunately, there are plenty of unnecessary narrations that get in the way of learning about this culture and Mr. Biswas' fate.

The book is long and dense. Reading it can feel like hiking through a swamp at times. The reward that is revealed at the beginning of the book - seeing Mr. Biswas achieve his dream of owning his own home - helped me get through this. show less

'Bigger than all of them was the house, his house',, May 31, 2014
By
sally tarbox (aylesbury bucks uk) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A House For Mr Biswas (Kindle Edition)
Wonderful read, highly entertaining with laugh-out-loud moments yet touchingly sad as well.
The novel opens shortly before the death of Mr Biswas, with his fear of losing his home. In the narrative that follows, charting Mr Biswas' life, forever vulnerable to the whims of others, and with no place to call his own, we come to see why the house has such significance for him.
For much of his life lack of money compels him to share a large communal house with his wife's family, overseen by the stern and unpredictable matriarch Mrs Tulsi. In his descriptions of the show more 'shifting, tangled, multifarious relationships' of the Tulsis come many of the novel's most vividly comic moments:

'To combat W C Tuttle's gramophone Chinta and Govind had been giving a series of pious singings from the Ramayana....she sang very well. Govind sang less mellifluously: he partly whined and partly grunted, from his habit of singing while lying on his belly, Caught in this crossfire of song, which sometimes lasted a whole evening, Mr Biswas, listening, listening, would on a sudden rush in pants and vest to the inner room and bang on the partition of Govind's room and bang on the partition of W C Tuttle's drawingroom.
The Tuttles never replied. Chinta sang with added zest. Govind sometimes only chuckled between couplets, making it appear to be part of his song.'

or

"One of the sons-in-law was invariably responsible for precipitating Mrs Tulsi's faint. He was now hounded by silence and hostility. If he attempted to make friendly talk many glances instantly reproved him for his frivolity. If he moped in a corner or went up to his room he was condemned for his callousness and ingratitude. He was expected to stay in the hall and show all the signs of contrition and unease.. He waited for the sounds of footsteps coming from the Rose Room; he accosted a busy, offended sister and, ignoring snubs, made whispered enquiries about Mrs Tulsi's condition. Next morning he came down, shy and sheepish. Mrs Tulsi would be better. She would ignore him. But that evening forgiveness would be in the air. The offender would be spoken to as if nothing had happened, and he would respond with eagerness.'

Brilliant observations on human behaviour, an absolute must-read. show less

While I really liked MIGUEL STREET, and even BEND IN THE RIVER (for entirely different reasons and in entirely different ways), A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS is my favorite V. S. Naipaul novel. The rambling odyssey of Mr Biswas in his quest for happiness and freedom, and of course for a house, is a delight to read. Probably Naipaul's most human book, it is a bit as if Charles Dickens was an East Indian early 20th century Trinidadian, but better.

Mr. Biswas is a stupid, thoughtless, feckless, odious man. His wife and her entire family and all their retainers are likewise stupid and odious, and we can add to the list — conniving.

Nothing of real consequence occurs in this novel. Nobody of consequence graces its pages. No person, with the possible exception of Mr. Burnett, the Sentinel editor who gives Mr. Biswas a job, is portrayed by the author as decent in his or her dealings with family or friends. The author has such contempt for his characters that he only reluctantly names them when he absolutely has to. The most contemptible characters get no name at all or a made-up mock name.

All of this takes place in a milieu of crushing poverty — material and spiritual. And we are show more treated to mind-numbing detail which seems to merely pile on the inconsequential sequence of events and stupefying contemptibility of the entire parade of people who populate this over-long novel. Nothing is served. Nobody learns a thing. The intergenerational poverty is not abated nor is the appalling ignorance.

So I ask, simply: WHY SHOULD ANYBODY SLOG THROUGH 566 PAGES OF SUCH INCONSEQUENTIAL DRIVEL ABOUT SO MANY CLUELESS PEOPLE WHO CANNOT GET OUT OF THEIR OWN WAY?

I have no answer. I am sorry I wasted my time. show less

Like many of the other reviewers here, I found this book very difficult to get into. Abandoned it once after 30 pages, but made a determined second attempt. Ultimately an intense reading experience, if not a great novel. I am astounded by those who speak of the book's "humour." What else amuses them? An elderly vet falling and breaking his hip on the steps of the cenotaph as he tries to lay a wreath? I found this book dark and painful in the extreme, a record of defeat unmitigated by the smallest pleasure; every meal is badly cooked, every physical object is jerry-built and damaged, every outing or promised treat ends in disappointment. (There is one exception, late in the story. "Laden hampers" are featured, an obsessive theme.) Family show more relationships are universally coercive and/or abusive. Stylistically, as others have noted, it is repetitive and without narrative shape. One feels that details and events have been included for extra-literary reasons. Naipaul says in his introduction to the 20th anniversary edition "Of all my books this is the one closest to me. It is the most personal, created out of what I saw and felt as a child." If this is remotely true it reveals a psychic wound of unimaginable depth and probably explains why Naipaul is widely regarded as a very nasty man, personally speaking. show less

This was a long slow read. It is a book I have on occasion seen referred to in other novels, so I had high expectations. It opens with the death of Mohun Biswas, aged 46, married and father of four children. His most satisfying achievement is dying in his own home and not that of his in-laws, the Tulsi's.
The story is set in Trinidad, Mohun is the son of Indian immigrants. The book then chronicles his life from his birth until his death. Unfortunately Mohun is not particularly likable, appearing as both gullible and petulant. Although well-intentioned, he is manipulated into an early marriage to the Tulsi's daughter, Shama, after leaving her a love note. He is soon to discover she is one of many daughters in a very large family. Despite show more several attempts to assert his independence from the Tulsi family, he makes erroneous decisions and is forced to co-habit with this large extended family in very close quarters.
I think what this story provides is an overview of cultural life in colonial Trinidad from the early thirties through the fifties. The story is so detailed with characters that it is evident that it is very personal. In fact the protagonist is based on the writers own father. I suspect that he himself is reflected in Mr Biswas's son Anand, who wins a scholarship to study in England. show less