A House for Mr. Biswas

Shiva Naipaul is a truly major Caribbean writer. He captures the volatile essence of that extremely unstable society. One added bonus is his inter-racial perspective, to which his Indian origins contributes decisively. This work ‘views a colonial world sharply with postcolonial perspectives.’ Any reader of West Indies fiction should combine a sense of history with some grasp of contemporary conditions. Although the novel was written in the 1960s, it still has a sense of contemporary relevance. Obviously, readers must keep their eyes open for younger writers in this mode. Naipaul’s works have rightly been integrated into the Educational System.      

Naipaul’s elegiac novel about his father begins with one of my favorite first lines: “Ten weeks before he died, Mr. Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St. James, Port of Spain, was sacked.” In an epic fashion, Naipaul renders the long, difficult life of the title character, giving him grace, even as he is unable to figure out just how to get the one thing he has always wanted: a house of his own.   

This is the book I open whenever I need inspiration. The evocation of a landscape and a community, the author’s precise attention to detail, the mix of comedy and tragedy, the range of characters, are all unforgettable. The story follows a man who dreams of owning a house but it’s also about the search for identity and the fear of oblivion. Throughout the novel, Biswas seeks to understand his purpose and disentangle himself from the binds of tradition and community. He realizes that in a colonial society, ownership of property signals his right to exist. Everything about this novel is… show more.

Immigrant books are frequently about striving to improve a family’s life while adapting to a new land with more than a bit of chauvinism about one’s origin culture. All of these elements are colorfully on display in this semi-autographical novel. Although this book is about an Indian family in the Caribbean, the story has many parallels to my own family’s immigrant experience as Polish Jews in America.