I don't think anything about this book is less than perfectly delightful except of course the personality of every character. A little autobiographical mixed with fiction, Mr. Naipaul wrote this book when he was 28 years old and I am totally in love with how he handles this book so much like you would handle your favourite toy from childhood. There are beautiful memories, ugly memories and you are gradually moving away from these memories and none of this is in your hands.

Mr. Biswas is a written not in 'show, not tell' way. We are told everything Mr. Biswas feels and does, making it more stream-of-consciousness than narrative at times. But the narrative is very strong with this one too, I don't know how much this resounds with non-South Asian nationals but for me, I could tell how nothing even when it felt exaggerated was a lie. The culture of Trinidad Indians even when so removed from the originating land holds true to a lot of practices and rituals practised in India, the good and the bad ones. The sprinkled casteism and racism, only exacerbated by poverty, is at times painful to read about. Maybe not painful, I come across it everyday, just a little disappointing now like reading the newspaper. The Tulsi house is the established microcosm, that lives independently and in contempt of the colonial Trinidad.

The attention to details and dialogues by Mr. Naipaul is so entertaining. I remember all pieces of furniture that Mr. Biswas owned and where the scratches and cracks were, how many times each of them was painted and moved, and how futile it was every time. By focussing so much on the materialism that overshadows Mr. Biswas's relationships, the author describes how the idea of society is changing for the poor of Trinidad. When earlier the bonded labours working in plantations had nothing but their family and friends to lean on, to decide their worth based on, the later generations armed with little resources and education try to based their identity on their independence from these relationships.

Mr. Biswas, with his Marcus Aurelius, paintbrushes and a very stupid and cowardly personality, makes an awkward hero who is never at peace with anyone or himself. A cynic and blame-shifter, he lives by never accepting consequences of his actions. Or has to face them, always rescued by someone who he will later criticise. Even the debt he takes to buy the house is to be shifted to his children and he who fears the end of loan period, dies much before it. Mr. Biswas is so detached and careless towards his wife and children, and the communication gap between him and everyone keeps increasing progressively. It is to Anand that he leaves his legacy of misery, constant fear and bad decisions. This was the most heart breaking part of the novel for me, I love Anand. A man so soft and intelligent, with courage and he ultimately cows down to his own family, unable to be himself, in order to not hurt his father. The scene where Mr. Biswas goes to cinema and leaves Anand is the whole definition of bad parenting.

Having a house of one's own is a way to identify oneself, my grandmother always goes 'Main Saroj bol rahi hu, MIG Colony se' and I am sure I will do the same in my life later. I understand Mr. Biswas's intense need to have a house to be oneself in, his lack of independence spurring him to stupid actions but I don't think I like him. He is too much of a dad and I have my problems in that sector.

This book is nothing more or less than the story of one man’s life, with all its quotidian struggles, pains, small victories and ultimate defeats. Like all V.S. Naipaul’s work I read it as subtly autobiographical. And indeed, Mr. Biswas is loosely based on his father Seepersad Naipaul. Seepersad was a poor sign painter from rural Trinidad who, captured by a mix of genius and desperation, rose to become a minor local journalist in Port of Spain. This book captures the inner life of a man trapped by his own limited circumstances and his wife’s sprawling matriarchal family, which he married into accidentally. I never fully appreciated how suffocating it could be to live around so many relations.

For someone like me who lacks Naipaul’s literary gifts, it is difficult to convey how extraordinary his prose is. This is a book that, one could argue, lacks a plot. There is no extravagant drama or denouement. It is the story of a lonely and rootless man, born to a historically-remote island, trying to lay claim to a tiny part of the earth for himself. This isn’t the kind of book that I would normally enjoy, especially spread over nearly 600 pages. Yet due to the authors genius it is an absolutely captivating read. Naipaul had an unrivalled capacity for zeroing in on the beautiful and painful subtleties of the human experience. His writing is grimly hilarious. I found myself unable to suppress laughter on numerous occasions. Scarcely a page goes by without some sublime sentence or paragraph. If the book had gone on forever I would not have felt oppressed by its length.

This was the novel that made Naipaul famous as a young man in the 1960s. It was a rare case of merit properly recognized. I find that for all his problematic qualities as a person and in his politics, he really gave people from the developing world an authentic voice. It was an honest, sometimes harsh voice. In this book he condemns Trinidad, but also writes the most moving ode to it that I could imagine. In his descriptions of the sprawling Tulsi family, he vividly expresses his own mixture of respect and disdain for his traditional Hindu Brahmin origins. This was a picture of the stifling world that his father longed to break free from but could never escape. His son succeeded.

This book was a catharsis and a pleasure to read. As I’ve said before everyone has to contend with V.S. Naipaul, particularly those of us who feel our origins are mutually intelligible with his. An unforgettable novel.

This one might make you pull your hair out. So if you're already bald you may need to read it wearing a wig. Also, you need a magnifying glass to find the plot. I had to take samples & send them off to a lab. Apparently there are detectable traces of story in here. But not so's you'd notice.

No.

The whole thing is a slow, ponderous crawl through the life of a Mr Third World Nobody who gets married by accident and appears to have four kids also by accident, without having any sex as far as I could see. Probably just pushed a specimen jar towards his wife every year or so, in between asking for the piccalilly and complaining about the declining quality of secondhand furniture.

Ugh.

The many pages of this book describe the awkward dealings Mr Biswas has with his in-laws and how he hates his various jobs. And pretty much nearly everything else.

But.

All this is made bearable by V S Naipaul's lovely fluent prose which on more than one occasion lifts the mundane details into the heights of the sublime.

Ah!

Ain't no must-read, but when you drag your ass to the end you get to have a brief glint of self-satisfaction.

Four stars, but through really gritted teeth.

Self-hating misery porn.

Is it like modern novels? No.
Is it entertaining? Not that much. Boring maybe.
Has it romance, thrill and 'that thing'? Not at all!
Should I read it? Of course!

If you are a serious fiction reader looking out for something special after your mundane, one of Naipaul's and Asia's best work is for you! Read it slowly; understand it deep; you hit the jackpot! A writer's grief becomes fodder for your thoughts.

This is the last book I anticipate finishing in 2012 andit required more then a bit of effort but in the end I am glad I took the time to read this 560 page narrative about life in the Indian colony living in Trinidad in the years immediately before and after World War II. Mr Biswas is modeled after Naipaul's own father and he is an interesting character. An agnostic Hindu he struggles through out his life to earn a living and a life while living withby his wife's relative's the Tulsi clan.
Biswas is frequently unlikeable and it is easy to see that he was neither a great husband or a father. However he is more human and more realistic because of his frailties, as are all the other characters that Naipaul weves through this dense narrative where little really happens.
Naipaul has written a naturalistic novel that depicts in close detail what life in Trinidad was like for a narrow group of people. The themes of the novel are universal, family, marriage and the relationship between parents and children. I believe i will remember this booklong afteri have forgotten the details of some of the books on this year's list which were more entertaining and easier to read.

If you want to challenge yourself with a difficult work of art in 2013 then you should think about reading this book.

An ordinary life full of ordinary dreams… But V.S. Naipaul in his extraordinary A House for Mr Biswas turns it into a piece of art.
Some lives are like rivers… Some lives are like brooks… Some days are like a light breeze and some days are like a heavy thunderstorm… That’s life…

Here and there Mr. Maclean’s roof leaked; that added to the cosiness of shelter. Water fell from the corrugations in evenly-spaced streams, enclosing the house. Water flowed down the sloping land below the roof; the pellets of dirt had long disappeared. Water gouged out tortuous channels as it forced its way down to the road and down to the hollow before the barracks. And the rain continued to roar, and the roof resounded.
For several seconds at a time lightning lit up a shining chaotic world. Fresh mud flowed off Tarzan’s grave in a thin regular stream. Raindrops glittered as they struck the sodden ground. Then the thunder came, grating and close. Anand thought of a monstrous steam-roller breaking through the sky. The lightning was exciting but it made him feel peculiar. That, and the thunder, sent him back to the bedroom.

The novel is very lavish in words, emotions, colours and subtle observations.

How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the shadow of the strong.

A House for Mr Biswas is a meticulous analysis of human weakness…
Mr Biswas rebels but he is scared of his own rebellion.
Mr Biswas has tremendous ambitions but he is too afraid to fulfill them.
Mr Biswas has very high hopes but he is too weak to realize them.
He thinks that he fights for a better life but he just fights windmills. His life is nothing but struggle and then he dies.
But his children turned out to be his real wealth.

"Biswas" is my kind of novel. Some complain that it is a bit meandering and aimless, and this is true to an extent. But what the book aims to accomplish (I suspect) is not to give the reader some nice and tidy story with a beginning, middle, and end. Naipaul is aiming for something far more epic: to describe a man's life. He literally starts with Biswas's birth and tracks this willful, sad, cocky man's life all the way to his death. The fact that Biswas's life is full of the mundane does not make the book any less amazing or enjoyable. In fact, at one point in the novel, Biswas tries his hand at writing short stories, and all of his attempts are empty wish-fulfillent tales that ring hollow and leave their author quite disatisfied. He is frustrated and put-upon and driven practically crazy by his in-laws, but his life is far more complex and intersting than the ones he tries to fabricate in his stories. And this is what impresses me about Naipaul's work. He takes an ordinary, sometimes riduculous man, and makes him an unknowing hero in his own life.

Biswas's life would not be nearly as satisfying to learn about if it were not draped in the lush language of V.S. Naipaul, who coaxes high drama and sincere emotion from his character's ramblingly ordinary life. Though the story takes place in Trinidad among a mostly Indian community, Naipaul makes Biswas imminently relatable as he deals with crises universal to everyone, including the death of parents, sibling rivalries, awkwardly courting the woman you hardly know, abrupt and unexpected career changes, breaking ties with the past to set off on your own, the joys and heartbreaks of children, and ultimately, the simple act of trying to find a house of his own.

Mingled amidst all of this banal drama are the rather exotic (to me anyway) cultural norms of Hinduism and Indian society, both of which Biswas constantly resists. I was impressed that, though some of his struggles are so foreign, I could relate to every little incident he experiences.

Overall, this read like and Indian John Updike novel: the story of a flawed protaganist who doesn't realize how big of a jackass he is, who by the end of the work you find yourself rooting for nonetheless as he finds small successes in an otherwise ridiculous life.

To people who are in love with language, I can't recommend this work highly enough.

It is a painful book to read because a lot of the things Naipaul has written about has happened in your own family. Or on your street. It is so brutal that you wonder how Naipaul could write about his own father and his childhood with such vicious humor that almost seems to border on cruelty. There is no magic realism here. It is a book about a terribly wounded and helpless people which on the surface seems to be told bereft of any sympathy. Naipaul does not romanticize the lives of the Indian poor and helpless. As he himself said, he is only interested in serving literature and not the human race.

The book is about a lot of things - a Hindu upbringing, life in a Hindu joint family, the post-colonial experience ..... but for me it was mostly a book about a flawed, helpless and weak people. The Hindu family in A House For Mr Biswas is almost like a country with its internal power struggles and upheavals. The weak are perpetually pitted against each other and are constantly reminded by the strong that they are weak every time they try to raise their heads even a little bit. His life in this cruel joint Hindu family might have shaped much of Naipaul's worldview. I read an interview with Naipaul in which he said that he was very good at perceiving a persons flaws right from the time of his childhood.

It is not a pleasant book to read. There is a lot of cruelty (a cruelty which has no meaning and is a way of life itself, as Naipaul wrote in A Wounded Civilization). You will find yourself hating the characters - the men are mostly cowards, the women are beaten and their hands smell of the vegetables that they just chopped up. I actually lost interest in the novel many times over the one month when I was reading it because a lot of it is about the pettiness and stupidity of the characters. But there is so much in it to appreciate - the description of the gradual dereliction of the estate occupied by the Tulsis, the account of Anand attending the exhibition exams, the Biswas' holiday at the beach house and the hilariously stupid acts of the characters which seem to generate positive consequences while rational actions often seem to lead to unfavorable developments.

A lot of people hate Naipaul, but the more I read his books, the more I feel like he is the only Indian writer who writes the terrible and horrifying truth about the Indian experience.

Naipaul lays it all out in the open. Despite the cruel humor and severity of his portrayals, he is not a man who insists on a particular way of life. As he wrote in Magic Seeds - “It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling...”.

The novel that marked VS Naipaul’s rise as one of the world’s literary stalwarts, A House for Mr Biswas straddles the years before and after World War II. The eponymous Mr Biswas is named Mohun, and is called either that, or ‘Biswas’, or ‘Man’, or, derisively, ‘crab-catcher’ by those around him, but always referred to—tellingly—by his narrator as ‘Mr Biswas’. As a baby, as a boy, he is still, in Naipaul’s words, Mr Biswas, an indication, perhaps, of Biswas’s lifelong need (only partly and rarely fulfilled) to win the respect and envy of those around him, the right to be addressed as a man of some worth.

The story follows Mr Biswas, from his birth in a poor village household, to his brief apprenticeship as a pundit, then the varying professions and occupations he goes through: sign painter, shopkeeper, ‘labourer’, reporter, semi-government servant. It follows a callow teenager of a Mr Biswas as he makes a tentative pass at Shama, the daughter of the Tulsis, the vast joint family that inhabits Hanuman House. It takes him into the house as Shama’s bridegroom, soon lost in the ordered chaos of the Tulsi household, trying desperately to keep his head up, learning the politics of the family, building relationships, seeing them disintegrate. Picking quarrels. Becoming, by the time he’s thirty-three, the frustrated father of four children.

The theme that runs throughout the book (and which is indicated by its very title) is, of course, that of Mr Biswas’s attempt to buy, build, or rent a house for himself and his family. A house unencumbered by Tulsis, a house of his own. This, though, is just the underlying theme. The story itself is one of relationships: of emotion, jealousy, ambition, even—shining forth now and then and invariably in the unlikeliest of circumstances—love.

A House for Mr Biswas is engrossing, sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous (though usually in a bitter, satirical way). It is not, however, a lovable book. Its characters aren't lovable, not even its protagonist. What makes it a memorable book, though, is the overall effect. The way the story moves, the way Naipaul creates a sense of time and space. The characters themselves, who come alive in ways that remind us uncomfortably of our own foibles and idiosyncrasies. The astonishing understanding of human nature and its ability to—sometimes simultaneously—hate and love, respect and despise, aspire for and deride.

No, not a lovable book, but certainly an admirable one.

A well-told tale of a relatively ordinary life. The author’s ruthless objectivity sometimes makes the life seem, in equal measures, both tragic and comic. The cultural context of Caribbean island life was fascinating for this American who lives so far from a sea that many of his friends and family find seafood disgustingly alien.

“How can you not believe in God after this?”

Funny and insightful, Naipaul does his usual genius tricks of shining light on a postcolonial society while illustrating the perpetual quest to find one's identity.