by V.S. Naipaul
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Product Description
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.
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.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Achingly good, 2008-08-08
I 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.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 CLEANSING, 2008-07-08
Expect 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.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
I loved it!, 2008-02-15
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.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Brilliant! , 2008-02-06
I hate typing so I will just say that the sense of alienation in this book's characters is most akin to my world view.
Darkly funny and my favorite book ever!
5 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
Incomparable, 2006-11-29
Naipaul is a genius.This book is above and beyond.If after reading this book you don't acknowledge Naipaul's genius, you can feel free to consider yourself a functional illiterate who has no love for the english language or understandig of the human condition.
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