A House for Mr. Biswis
V.S. Naipaul, 1961
Knopf Doubleday
576 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375707162
Summary
The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant career, A House for Mr. Biswas is an unforgettable story inspired by Naipaul's father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels.
The book that first brought Naipaul worldwide acclaim, this richly comic novel tells the moving story of a man without a single asset who enters a life devoid of opportunity, and whose tumble-down house becomes a potent symbol of the search for identity in a postcolonial world
In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous—and endless—struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark comedy of manners, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man’s quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 17, 1932
• Where—Chaguanas, Trinidad
• Education—Queen's Royal College, Trinidad; B.A., University
College, Oxford
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 2001; Booker Prize, 1971; knighted by
Queen Elizabeth II, 1990
• Currently—Wiltshire, England, UK
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990 and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.
He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist.
In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work...
for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.... Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.
The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad:
Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of thevanquished.
His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Ideologue Edward Said, for example, has argued that he "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies". This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India.
His works have become required reading in many schools within the developing World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul's following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States.
Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably "analysed" India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with 'grudging affection' (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with 'ungrudging affection' (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as an indentured labourer. The mention of this is found in his work An Area of Darkness.
More
Writing in the New York Review of Books about Naipaul, Joan Didion said:
The actual world has for Naipaul a radiance that diminishes all ideas of it. The pink haze of the bauxite dust on the first page of Guerrillas tells us what we need to know about the history and social organization of the unnamed island on which the action takes place, tells us in one image who runs the island and for whose profit the island is run and at what cost to the life of the island this profit has historically been obtained, but all of this implicit information pales in the presence of the physical fact, the dust itself... The world Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual human endeavor... This world of Naipaul's is in fact charged with what can only be described as a romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact...
In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul's support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a "creative passion", and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a "mortal wound." He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers.
In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul's sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia's Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier.
In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of "Indian" and "African" and to concentrate on being "Trinidadian". He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad.
Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for the Pakistani newspaper, The Nation, for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul's first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Some older works have few mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Arguably Mr. Naipaul's finest novel, A House for Mr. Biswas...created a bittersweet fictional portrait of his father, a struggling Trinidadian journalist trying to support his large family while holding onto his own dreams.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times (from a 2000 review of Naipaul's Between Father and Son)
Naipaul has constructed a marvelous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power.
Newsweek
Discussion Questions
1. A House for Mr. Biswas is a largely autobiographical novel about V.S. Naipaul's own family. Mr. Biswas is based on Naipaul's father and the character of Anand on Naipaul himself. What specific experiences described in the novel, and especially the relationship between father and son, lead Anand to become a writer? What advantages will he have that Mr. Biswas did not? What conclusions can you draw about Naipaul's life based on the book?
2. Mr. Biswas enters into the world "six-fingered and born in the wrong way" [p. 15], and a life of bad luck is presaged for him. In what ways does this prophecy seem to come true?
3. Early in the novel, Mr. Biswas, a sign-painter and later a journalist, writes a love letter to Shama. What are the immediate consequences of this letter? What are its long-term effects? Is it ironic that writing plays such an important role in determining Mr. Biswas's fate?
4. At various points the narrative jumps ahead, describing an experience or situation years from the fictional present. When Mr. Biswas is cowed by the Tulsi family into marrying Shama, the narrator reflects, "How often, in the years to come, at Hanuman House or in the house at Shorthills or in the house in Port of Spain, living in one room, with some of his children sleeping on the next bed . . . how often did Mr. Biswas regret his weakness, his inarticulateness, that evening" [p. 87]! How does knowing the novel's fictional future affect the way we read what is happening in its present? For example, does Mr. Biswas' death, discussed in the prologue and therefore known throughout the novel, give a poignancy to his struggles?
5. Why do the characters in A House for Mr. Biswas switch between Hindi and broken English? What does this suggest about the hybrid nature of Trinidadian society and its colonial history?
6. Throughout the novel Mr. Biswas battles the Tulsi family, engaging in one quarrel after another. Why does he find living with them so distasteful, so humiliating? Why do the Tulsis, in turn, find Mr. Biswas unbearable? What kinds of things do they argue about? Are the subjects of these arguments inherently important or do mask more serious differences?
7. When Mr. Biswas moves his family to The Chase, he is puzzled by his wife's nagging: "Living in a wife-beating society, he couldn't understand why women were even allowed to nag or how nagging could have any effect" [p. 14]. And when Govind beats his wife Chinta, we're told that "her beatings gave Chinta a matriarchal dignity and, curiously, gained her a respect she had never had before" [p. 443]. Why would Chinta's status improve because of her beatings? How is flogging used throughout the novel? What does it suggest about power relations between men and women and between parents and children?
8. Why does Mr. Biswas feel trapped by his wife and family? Why does he regard Shama and the children as "alien growths, alien affections, which fed on him and called him away from that part of him which yet remained purely himself, that part which had for long been submerged and was now to disappear" [p. 461]? What kind of life does he feel his family keeps him from living?
9. Why does Mr. Biswas become a journalist? What aspects of his temperament and experience enable him to excel at the kind of writing the Sentinel initially demands? How does his success at the paper change his status within the Tulsi family? 10. Mr. Biswas tells his son Anand, "Remember Galilyo. Always stick up for yourself" [p. 267]. In what ways is Mr. Biswas himself a rebel? On what occasions does he defy others and stand up for himself?
11. Mr. Biswas is highly critical of Hinduism—and indeed of all religions—for most of the novel. He chides Owad for worshiping idols and blames the failure of his shop at The Chase on Hari's ritual blessing. What does the novel as a whole seem to be saying about the role of religion in Trinidadian society? How does religion affect the ways the characters in the novel treat each other?
12. When Owad returns from his medical studies at Cambridge, he is filled with opinions about writers and artists such as T. S. Eliot and Pablo Picasso, both of whom he loathes. He also considers himself a communist. After a bitter quarrel, Mr. Biswas suggests, "communism, like charity, should begin at home" [p. 533]. What does Naipaul appear to be saying, through the character of Owad and the quality of life at the Tulsi house, about the value of communal living?
13. Naipaul has often been praised for his comic gifts. Which scenes or situations in A House for Mr. Biswas give rise to comedy? In what ways does Mr. Biswas display his own comic and satiric sensibility?
14. In a letter he once wrote to his father, Naipaul explains that literature boils down to "writing from the belly rather than from the cheek. Most people write from the cheek. If the semi-illiterate criminal wrote a long letter ordinarily to his sweetheart, it would be what most letters of such people generally are. If the criminal wrote this letter last thing before his execution, it would be literature; it would be poetry." In what ways does Naipaul himself write from the belly rather than the cheek?
15. A House for Mr. Biswas tells the story of an ordinary man with modest ambitions whose life is not marked by dramatic events. How does Naipaul imbue his story with the pathos and significance that have won the book worldwide acclaim since its initial publication? Does Mr. Biswas achieve a kind of victory at the end?
16. In what ways does Mr. Biswas's longing for a house of his own parallel Trinidad's struggle for national independence? What is it that fuels his longing? What does owning a house represent for him? In what ways is the Tulsi family like ruling colonial power? At the end of the novel, Mr. Biswas is finally able to realize his dream of owning a house, but the experience is not what he anticipated. How is his experience symbolic of Trinidad's own situation after the end of colonial rule?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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