This is less a review than a memoir. I’ve read V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas at least twice but it’s been a very long time since I last did. What follows is based on what I recall. The story was, and is, a personal favourite of mine.
Published in 1961, the novel tells the story of the hapless Mr. Mohun Biswas, a man who spends a lifetime seeking dignity and independence in a world reluctant to grant them to him. It’s a comic novel as Mr. Biswas’ various efforts meet with degrees of calamity.
His goal is to own a house. He equates it with independence, and he associates independence with the dignity he struggles to find. A man with his own house commands respect, in Mr. Biswas’ mind.
However, he is mostly treated as a fool: A tolerable one in some cases; an annoying one in others; and in yet others, he’s seen as an easy mark. He feels oppressed by the family he marries into and is immediately resentful of them, exacerbating the situation.
All he has in great supply is blame, and he dispenses it freely.
Mr. Biswas is not a likeable man. He gripes constantly. He chafes against everything. He feels put upon by life and is rancorous because of it.
Life is an opponent to be mastered, for Mr. Biswas. That mastery will be symbolized in a house of his own.
Yet despite his bitterness, his contrariness, and his overall disagreeable nature, we like him … if only for the tenacity of his effort. Despite disaster piled upon disaster as he carries on his endless battle, he gets up and continues his personal little war. He’s determined he will beat the world.
A House for Mr. Biswas is a picaresque novel as it moves from episode to episode through the life of its titular character. Naipaul’s creation is a Don Quixote figure turned inside out by his acrimonious personality. Where Don Quixote is a romantic dreamer, Mr. Biswas is a curmudgeon.
The novel begins just shy of its end:
Ten weeks before he died, Mr. Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St. James, Port of Spain, was sacked. He had been ill for some time. In less than a year he had spent more than nine weeks at the Colonial Hospital and convalesced at home for even longer. When the doctor advised him to take a complete rest the Trinidad Sentinel had no choice. It gave Mr. Biswas three months’ notice and continued, up to the time of his death, to supply him every morning with a free copy of the paper.
Mr. Biswas was forty-six, and had four children. He had no money. His wife Shama had no money. On the house in Sikkim Street Mr. Biswas owed, and had been owing for four years, three thousand dollars. The interest on this, at eight percent, came to twenty dollars a month; the ground rent was ten dollars. Two children were at school. The two older children, on whom Mr. Biswas might have depended, were both abroad on scholarships.
It gave Mr. Biswas some satisfaction that in the circumstances Shama did not run straight off to her mother to beg for help. Ten years before that would have been her first thought. Now she tried to comfort Mr. Biswas, and devised plans on her own.
In a sense, all of the novel is encapsulated in these first three paragraphs: the debt, the quest for more money, the accumulation of obligations — the obstacles between Mr. Biswas and his dream of freedom. Everything else is detail. The fleshing out of the story. All that is missing in this opening is the character of Mr. Biswas, which appears almost immediately in the dialogue that follows.
Poor Mr. Biswas. Even when he succeeds he fails. As most home-owners know, even when you own your own house, you don’t. Someone to whom you owe money really owns it. You just get to live there pretending you do, as long as you keep up your payments.
I think that from my first time reading the novel I’ve identified with Mr. Biswas and his frustrations, and his irritation with the admonishing voices that always surround him. I also saw my father in him, and his frustrations. In both cases, those identifications have involved some pretty imaginative leaps, but that’s what imagination is for.
The book also describes a world moving from colonial to post-colonial and that’s a significant aspect of the book, particularly as it relates to Trinidad. But to be honest, that didn’t resonate with me at the time I read the novel. Today I might be more alert to them, but I’ve never had much interest in the social and political characteristics of books. It’s the people I relate to and I find it easy to relate to Mr. Biswas, his wife Shama, the Tulsi family, and others in the book.
A House for Mr. Biswas is a tremendously comic novel and it’s the humour that prevents it from being a turgid and gloomy recounting of a nothing life. Either because of, or in spite of, the man he is (I’m not sure which), Mr. Biswas acquires the dignity he seeks, not through a house, but through his tenacious refusal to quit and accept his lot as he’s continually urged to do.
Tragic though he may be, in the end you admire Mr. Biswas.
January 21, 2018