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A House for Mr. Biswas |
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| Author: V.S. Naipaul Published: 2001-03-13 |
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List price: $15.95 Our price: $10.85 |
Usually ships in 24 hours As of: November 19th, 2008 06:46:29 PM |
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Customer comments on this selection. Trapped, trapped, trapped!..You cannot help being captivated by the prose of V.S Naipaul. While the phrasing is more ragged and stretched than the one found in his masterpiece, A Bend in the River, it's still state of they art. There is however much more to this book than excellent writing, it's also a beautiful story of the birth, life, dreams and death of a human being. The novel's main character, Mr Biswas, is skillfully used to lighten the short comings of the family oriented rural community where one is supposed to do what is expected of you and not necessarily what will be best for your own happiness. In this trapped life Biswas coins his life dream: his own piece of this earth, with his own house on it where he can live in accordance to his own values and be free. One cannot help feeling that this book is really about a modern westerner being dropped into a ancient culture he does not belong in, respects or understands. A truly powerful story that made me realize how fundamental the right to your own life, property and thoughts really are Some Novels Define Their Place and TimeA House for Mr. Biswas is such a novel, a depiction of a whole culture, the melted-pottage immigrant world of the Caribbean, with Biswas a synecdoche of post-colonial peoples everywhere. Such novels need to be big, both in their time frame and in number of pages. Don't expect them to cater to your cultural values or desires for diversion. Mr Biswas, however, is very entertaining, one of the funniest novels I've ever read, and the last in which V.S. Naipaul allowed full freedom for his exuberant sense of humor and the picturesque. If you are too upright to find the poor and alienated a proper subject for satire, you might well find old Biswas more frustrating than touching. If so, I pity you. In this book and in his earlier Trinidadian novels, Naipaul wrote from the inside out, and it was chiefly himself than he was mocking. His later novels, great as some of them are, view their subjects from the outside, from Olympus as it were. Frankly, I think A House for Mr. Biswas is naipaul's greatest achievement. What other novels are there that expand almost to be congruent with their whole cultural setting? If I name some, you'll see how highly I value Biswas: Don Quixote, for Spain in its Golden Age Simplicius Simplicissimus, for 17th C Germany Tom Jones, for 18th C England Dombey and Sons, for 19th C England The Makioka Sisters, for pre-Americanization Japan Buddenbrooks, for pre-WW1 Germany That's enough. You'll get the idea. Such novels capture more than events. They capture the tone. The language they are written in has to be the language of that time and that place. Can you imagine Don Quixote in the style of Anthony Trollope, or The Makioka Sisters in the style of Charlotte Bronte? Naipaul's language in Mr. Biswas is as natural to backstreet Trinidad as Dickens's droll exaggerations were to foggy London. Achingly goodI never understood why it says this is a `comic' masterpiece on the cover. It's true that A House for Mr Biswas is often funny and always biting, but as a novel this is tragic and grindingly dark stuff. Even the happy ending (given away at the beginning of the book; I'm not spoiling anything for you here), only is a happy end of sorts. Perhaps it is the inexhaustible undercurrent of cheerfulness amid the squalor that makes this so readable, and on the surface a `comic' work. The novel describes the life of Mohun Biswas, the son of poor peasants of Indian descent in Trinidad, and his long trajectory from the sugarcane worker's hut to a still precarious position as dispatch writer for one of the capital's newspapers. Most of it is concerned with his struggle to escape from his very closed, self-obsessed community, still ridden with the caste prejudices and rituals of a Mother India its members have never seen, and from the tentacles of the Tulsi clan, a monster wringing dry the weak for the benefit of the leaders, into which he was tricked into marrying. Biswas wastes his life among the fields in various backwaters. He is swindled to ruin as a shopkeeper. He is threatened with knifing and arson. But mostly he can't be alone; he can't obtain the privacy, the minimum self-sufficiency without which there can be no dignity and for which the all-encompassing desire to own his own house comes to stand. Probably largely autobiographical - Biswas appears loosely modelled on Naipaul's father - A House for Mr Biswas has the strength of novels written from experience. It is richly precise and vivid in its portrayal of places, of people and situations, and in recording the passage of time in the small island of Trinidad. It transports the reader to a doubly foreign, faraway world, to great effect. In fact, the strangeness adds to the disorientation one shares with Biswas, making the story even more realistic. And this block of a novel is ceaselessly imaginative and never boring. One piece of trivia: probably a coincidence, but the plot's outline for The Shipping News, Annie Proulx's prize-winning novel, is contained in a one-paragraph anecdote in the later pages of Naipaul's book.  CLEANSINGExpect no great literary pyrotechnics here, no awesome writing style, no innovative and groundbreaking technique, and also no keen psychological insight into the minds of the characters. What you can expect is a good old fashioned narrative that firmly drives from birth to death the life of a Trinidad Indian man who's life is filled with fear and bad choices and a chaotic and truly overwhelming family. I had heard so long about this book, and its title had catched my eyes for years, when finally at the beginning of this summer I finally checked it out from the library and started reading it. It is not as great of book as I'd like it to be, as I enjoy reading, but still there is something that holds my fancy to it, and after finishing it, I find it cleansing in that everytime I think about Mr. Biswas' poor life, his poor choices, THAT FAMILY that despite it all I have grown some attachment to, I am so thankful for my life and for the family I have. Yes, my father and mother are not perfect, where I grew up was a bit cramped with little privacy and so on and so on, but LORD that doesn't hold a light to Mr. Biswas home life!!! I was in the shower today and I couldn't help being so incredibly greatful for the family and home I was born into! So this book, like all really great literature, has revealed something in my own life, about my own reality and place in the world and has made me feel blessed and for that I am really thankful. I loved it!Another selected novel for my high school literature class. What a great story! Mr Biswas and his family were such characters! Full of richness, weirdness and life. Very real with all of the emotions, quirks and traits that make us distinct and unique humans. I love Naipaul. |
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