Fun fact touching on both V.S. Naipaul and the James Bond movies. Did you know that A House for Mr. Biswas was once in production as a Broadway musical? The following quote is from the obituary of songwriter John Barry, The New York Times, 2 Feb. 2011:

The origins of the James Bond theme are disputed. Mr. Norman [Barry's biographer] said that Barry brushed off a musical passage from “Bad Sign, Good Sign,” a song he had written for a musical version of the V. S. Naipaul novel A House for Mr. Biswas. With a few adjustments, it became the theme to Dr. No, [the film that launched the James Bond series].

Surreal...

"A House for Mr. Biswas" by V.S. Naipaul is a solid family chronicle in the tradition of Buddenbrooks. Of all I have read, however, I found it most similar to the "Cairo Trilogy" Naguib Mahfouz in that the "Cairo Trilogy" which like "A House for Mr. Biswas" takes place in the British Empire primarily in the first half of the 20th Century. Both Mahfouz and Naipaul have their families struggling to get ahead yet barely surviving. Mahfouz believes that things would be better in a Communist world. Naipaul considers Communism as his work is in its climax and then dismisses it contemptuously.
As most other reviewers have noted, "A House for Mr. Biswas" offers an extraordinary portrait of Trinidad's Indian community as it existed during Naipaul's life. Mohan Biswas is recruited into the extended Tulsi family because he is a Brahmin. Because of his general ineptitude, Mr. Biswas is never granted even the slightest authority. The family chooses instead to manage his affairs for him. Biswas finally manages to extract himself from the clutches of the Tulsi's by buying and moving into his own house. The move is somewhat irrelevant as his life drawing to a close when he makes his escape.
While "A House for Mr. Biswas" is a great book worthy of a Nobel Laureate, it still has faults. The most serious is its inordinate length. The work which is highly autobiographical omits nothing. Naipaul appears to be unable to decide what if anything is his own experience lacks pertinence decides to tell everything.
Readers should also be aware that because Naipaul chooses to show the Hindi Indians as living in a cocoon of their own fabrication, he writes as if the other ethnic communities (English, Muslim Indian, and African) scarcely exist. Is his historical work, "The Loss of El Dorado" Naipaul describes the other Trinidadian communities in their full complexity because he is trying to describe the dynamics of a total colonial society. In "A House for Mr. Biswas", Naipaul is writing about a myopic community that cannot see its own shortcomings and is unaware of the rest of the world.

Really disappointing. All the hype, the good reviews and a Nobel prize and other than the decent writing and a little humor, this book really isn't that good. The main character is whiny, a coward, lacks growth and humor and with the last couple pages I read, decided to hit his wife. Its hard to justify feeling any empathy for a character like this especially when he brought it all down on himself. You know what would have made a good story? The main character's wife, Sharma. Seeing the world from her point of view, having to endure marrying and living with a hyper critical coward, a man who really only seems to care for himself and his want for his own house, that would have made a good story. I want her story.

This is a novel about persistence and longing. As such, it is not a page-turner. We the readers must experience Mohun’s tragedies, and navigate the ugliness and his failed hopes. In this, we do not necessarily identify with Mr. Biswas, but we come to understand him, and potentially people like him.

Taking place in Trinidad, Mohun’s father is killed in an accident looking for him in a pond. Of Indian ancestry in a still-colonial world, his life is filled with clawing and searching his way towards independence. As a young man, he is captured by the Tulsi family, and becomes a pawn in their strange family dynamics. He is trapped by the powerful women in the family and their machinations, and victimized repeatedly by his domineering brothers-in-law. Bookish but uneducated, at times it doesn’t seem like Mohun stands a chance. He takes many chances at individual freedom, each meeting with various levels of success and failures.

At points, Naipaul’s language is quite poetic. One passage stands out as a great example, “His whole past became a miracle of calm and courage.” (278) Introspection and poetry. “He put his feet down and sat still, staring at the lamp, seeing nothing. The darkness filled his head. All his life had been good until now. And he had never known. He had spoiled it all by worry and fear. About a rotting house, the threats of illiterate labourers.
Now he would never be able to go among people.
He surrendered to the darkness.” (278)

One of the more unlikable characters, to me, in the novel is Mr. Biswas’s wife-beating brother-in-law Govind, with whom he has a terrible conflict in the mode of bully and victim. However, there are moments of tenderness as well, such as the moment that Govind picks up and carries a sickly Mr. Biswas. “By carrying Mr Biswas in his arms Govind had put himself on the side of authority: he had assumed authority’s power to rescue and assist when there was need, authority’s impersonal power to forgive.” (308)

In his struggle for independence from the Tulsis, Mohun flees. Apart, he comes to some stunning conclusions – he cannot escape the past. “His freedom was over, and it had been false. The past could not be ignored; it was never counterfeit; he carried it within himself. If there was a place for him, it was one that had already been hollowed out by time, by everything he had lived through, however imperfect, makeshift and cheating.” (332) Ultimately, somehow, he does find a way to move forward. With no real skills, he becomes a journalist. He parleys that into enough success that he creates better opportunities for his children than he himself had. This is the story of a life, complete in its realities.

A sad tale in that Mr. is continually struggling for dignity as well as toward his goal of acquiring his own home in Trinidad, but then again, uplifting and hopeful as he keeps on trying.

I noticed a lot of the cultural references were similar to ones made in "Midnight's Children", by another Indian writer, Rushdie.

There it is, a modest roofed structure in Sikkim Street standing tall amid the perfumed beds of anthurium lilies. New memories of wet earth after the rain, freshly painted picket fences, the sweet flowers of laburnum tree, mixed aromas flouncing through the warm rooms and wind whiffing through the trees telescoping the painful past. A sense of belonging cherished with merited identity-Mr. Mohun Biswas’s house.

I shy away from the postcolonial contemporary third world fiction. Most of them overwhelm me enlightening the crude aspects of economic claustrophobia which my snobbish approach thoughtlessly overlooks. Keeping in mind this criterion, I cautiously pick out the respected genre books anticipating a satisfying comprehension. Naipaul pens a coherent depiction of impoverished dwelling lost between self-identity and rigid ambitions. It is an exasperating yet rewarding life of a simple man who survives the nightmarish surrealism of being born at the devilish midnight hour. Meet Mohun Biswas, the youngest son of a pitiable sugar-cane labourer whose birth was cursed upon by superstitious omen and was destined to be a ruinous disappointment. Mohun’s life churns out be a metaphoric banner for destitution and misfortune. Blamed for his father’s death and the dissolution of the Biswas family, he struggles through every twisted fate of his life trying to find a speck of self-respect, contentment and independence. His marriage in the celebrated Tulsis family is burdensome and intoxicated with him being a mere accessory in his wife’s home. Dutifully carrying on with the mundane obligations, he berates his sympathetic existence. The only shining beacon of hope is a far-fetched dream of buying a house he can call his own. The notion of acquiring an abode becomes an eternal symbol of Mohun’s own existence as a journalist, a father, a husband and moreover a liberated individual.

Naipaul’s vastly elucidated and slow-paced prose underlines quite a few post- colonization inadequacies prevalent in several third world settings till date. Poverty, illiteracy birthing preposterous superstitious dogma, ethnic categorization of class superiority (restricted only to rural infrastructures) and tribulations of pecuniary discrepancies outwitting social hysteria.

Mohun’s tale is heroic in its own humble way. All the man wants in his life is a cozy dwelling without the fear of acerbic prejudices. Some would ridicule on this psychological aspect of obtaining a house. It’s a house, for crying out loud! Why make a big deal of it? For an individual who not only thrives in poverty but is tossed among bizarre quarters of underprivileged hardships; the belief of owning a house becomes deeply satisfying, somewhat a battle in itself. Hear, Hear! To Mohun for making peace with his maddening ordinary living.

The Trinidadian-English dialogue is just brilliant, and the people are all so tragic and hilarious at the same time, and Mr. Biswas is called Mr. Biswas from the time he is BORN. How can you beat that? Even if you think Naipaul's politics stink, there's no denying this book is a masterpiece.

‘A House for Mr Biswas‘ does quite a fair job in demonstrating to its readers why owning a house for many mostly remains just a dream. It is difficult not just today but was equally impossible even in those days when people earned meagre $10/month (as Mr. Biswas did) to make ends meet.

Spanning across almost 46 years of Mr. Biswas’ life, the book focuses on his labors for a house he can call his own.

Mohun Biswas is an ill-omen for his family right since his birth given he enters the world of the living ‘the wrong way’ and with an extra finger. Born in a rural family in Trinidad to parents of Indian origin, Mr. Biswas has had to face unfortunate days since childhood. But the real trouble starts after his father’s death. Owing to unscrupulous neighbors, they have to sell their house. The family disintegrates and scatters to live with relatives.

Later, as he grows, he is denied education and is pushed stead-first into the ‘pundit’ business which he realizes is not meant for him and ventures into a sign-painting business with his friend’s advice and support. He falls in love with a wealthy client’s daughter, Shama. He marries her and becomes a member of the enormous Tulsi-household.

The plot, for the most part, drags through Mr. Biswas’ struggle for economic independence and to break-free of the Tulsi dominance. As the years pass, he grows exceedingly depressed and leaves the Tulsi house with his wife and four kids. He suffers constant rebuttals from Shama and her family, becomes a journalist, educates his kids, skips jobs, moves places, in search of that one place he can call home.

Although this is a slow read, the witty humor sprinkled with intellectual bits make the prose enjoyable. At times, it is full of saturnine descriptions and at times, dripping with worthwhile thoughts. Read this quote here and you’ll get a taste of the book,

“Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times for him was almost like an act of sacrifice.”
Mohun Biswas is a perfectly compelling character with an unsympathetic-to-the-point-of-being-utmost-rude demeanor, a man easily provoked by scorns and gibes, a grudges-held-to-the-heart-and-never-to-be-forgotten man, and determined-with-lasting-paranoia for a house of his own.

Even though the plot isn’t out-of-the-way appealing, the overall description of the places, the community, the people, adversities and afflictions right from the oldest to the youngest character, their mirths and miseries, make the book a gripping melodramatic page-turner, even if that is punctuated with long-drawn sighs.

This is not the typical run-on-fast-track with an extraordinary-twists-and-turns book, but if you are good at being godly-patient with lengthy stories that don’t promise much, this might just be the book for you!

I’ll be damned if I say I didn’t like the book because I did. Because just like Mr. Biswas, I too am invariably obsessed about owning a house that I can call my own. So, if this has/had been your dream too, you’ll love the book.

Part of me wants to say that this is something like all of the Rabbit series mashed down into one sprawling book and set in Trinidad among people of Indian descent, but that's so reductive, and kind of an insult.

Mr Biswas is so painfully human, struggling to have a meaningful life, fucking up left and right, being brutalized and brutalizing in turn. This was the first book that I've read in a long time that I read for pleasure, because I wanted to, instead of because I thought it would be edifying from a craft perspective or some such. And it re-instilled the pleasure of reading, of being told a story, being taken on a journey.

Also, it paints a world so completely foreign to me, one that I can hardly comprehend, that I'm still getting flashes of it in my head as I'm writing this.

So Mr.Biswas was very overwhelmed when some one offered him a holiday-trip. He had always regarded holiday simply as days on which he did not go to work; he had never thought that he might use the time to take his family to some resort. The thing was BEYOND his ambition.

Thus, I finally read VS Naipaul, and after finishing it I must say he is an Indian (though Indian-origin) version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or JM Coetzee.

This book was legendary, cut to cut : starts from Mr Biswas's birth and ends at his death. The life of upheavals, humiliations, and most of all segregation from society around. Mr.Biswas arrested with every kind of emotion in his life. Even living as a pauper.
At last when he was step away from his home and then he got that happiness even that was not whole. Crooked.

I am 27 now, with good job and decent income. But now I am longing for most is house. My own house. I loved this book as I could related with me.

And another interesting aspect of it was: I lived my childhood and many instances in it, at least more than 50 times.

I loved this book as I could relate it with me.

A hugely enjoyable, though simultaneously excruciating, novel. Naipaul has created a character in Mohun Biswas who is, at once, deeply unsympathetic – prone to minor spites, absurd self-regard, and the petty enactment of drawn-out and demeaning grudges against those nearest to him – but whose struggle to assert his independence, identity and worth against the odds (even against the fate outlined for him at birth) is utterly compelling.

The descriptions of family life, of community, and of the natural and social landscape of mid-twentieth Trinidad are lush and gloriously sensual. There are sentences to die for, and passages of haunting beauty. The glorious, terrible, hilarious and tragic conflict of order and chaos, stability and subversion, in the Tulsi family (into which Mr Biswas marries and against whom he constantly rails) is richly depicted. Naipaul combines acute psychological observation and a satirical social and political sensibility to tell, beautifully, a simple human story.

" العبث ليس كامنا في الإنسان ولا في العالم إذا ما فكرنا في كل منهما بمعزل عن الأخر .. إنه جزء لا انفصام له عن الظرف البشري ، ليس مجرد فكرة مجردة ، وإنما يتكشف لنا يوميا في استنارة باعثة على الحزن "
( جان بول سارتر )

الرواية تفاصيل معاناة إنسان سيئ الحظ ، إنسان فشل في فهم ومسايرة منطق الحياة الذي يرنو إلى العبث ، يعيش أيامه مطاردا من قسوة الفقر وسوء الحظ ، يحاصره شعور بأن انسانياته مكبلة وأنه عاجز عن إختيار طريقه ، لم يختار ان يأتي إلى الدنيا ، لم يختار أن يتزوج ، لم يختار أن ينجب أربعة أطفال .. إنه مسير بطريقة ما .

لم تنفعه مباركات الكهان في أن يكون له حظ أفضل ، كان يمكنه أن يكون ثريا لولا تلك الليلة التي غرق فيها العجل ، كان يمكن أن يكون أفضل حالا لو لم يغرق والده وهو يبحث عن جثمان إبنه ، لو تمسك بأرضه ولم يبيعها ، لو رفض الضغوط للزواج بـ شاما .. لكن الحياة أبت إلا أن تعامله بعبث لا يفهمه .


تراءت له ليلة أمس وكأنها إحدى ليالي طفولته الأولى ، واعتصره حزنه الذي امتزج لمخاوفه ، على حياة سعيدة لم يستطع يوما أن يستمتع بها ، حياته التي أدرك الأن أنها ضاعت من بين يديه ..
كما تعامل مع الأحداث ؛ تعامل مع الناس ، يقابلهم ، ويحادثهم وكأنه مازال يعيش في الأمس ، ثم تأتي التساؤلات ، والنتيجة الحتمية هي : علاقة أخرى تفسد ، وجزء أخر من حاضره يتم تدميره .
اليوم الذي يبدأ كـأي يوم سعيد طبيعي ؛ ينتهي به وقد وقع فريسة لطوفان من التساؤلات المحمومة . ينظر ، ويتساءل ، فيمتلكه الخوف ، ثم يتساءل ثانية ؛ في تتابع مذهل يحدث في سرعة البرق


شئ واحد أراده السيد بيسواس وأصر عليه ؛ أن يكون له بيت يضم فيه اًسرته ، كان قدره أن يعيش جل حياته متنقلا السكنى في بيوت الأخرين ، لكنه لم يستسلم للفشل وسوء الحظ ، أصر ألا يترك أبناءه لقدره ، صمم أن يمتلك بيته الخاص يوما ما .

حقق حلمه أخيرا بعد سلسلة من المحاولات الفاشلة ، أصبح له بيت ، لكن العبث لم يتركه ، هاجمته الحياة بأقصى أسلحتها ؛ عجزته بالمرض ، فقد عمله في الجريدة ولم يعد لديه سوى معاش لمدة 5 سنوات ، فأضطر أخيرا أن يقترض 5000 دولار بضمان بيته ، وكان معرضا في النهاية أن يفقد بيته إذا عجز عن السداد في نهاية السنوات الخمس ، وقتها كان سيفقد كل شئ .

لكن قبل أن يموت أظهرت له الحياة وجه أخر ، أشفقت عليه ، رأى أبناءه يسافرون في بعثات علمية وينجحون ، لم يفقد بيته الذي أفنى عمره لكي يحصل عليه بعد أن وجدت إبنته وظيفة لتصبح مسئولة عن الأسرة من بعده ، كتب لإبنه : كيف لا يمكنه أن يؤمن بالله بعد كل هذا .. الأن يمكنه أن يموت مطمئنا .


ما أفظع لو أنه لم يمتلك هذا البيت في ذلك الحين ؛ لو انه مات بين التولسيين ، وسط أفراد تلك الأسرة الكبيرة المفككة واللامبالية ، بظروفهم المقيتة ؛ لو أنه ترك شاما والأطفال يعيشون في حجرة واحدة . والأسوأ من ذلك لو أنه عاش دون أن يحاول إعلان أحقيته في نصيبه من العالم .. لو أنه عاش ومات كما ولد ؛ لا قيمة له ولا مأوى


عن الرواية بشكل عام

إنهاء هذه الرواية يعد إنجازا .. في أجزاء كثيرة خاصة في ربعها الأول قد تصيبك التفاصيل الكثيرة في الوصف والرتابة التي يكتب بها نيابول بالإزعاج . تحتاج الكثير من الصبر في القراءة ، ولا يمكن أن تقرأها مع أي كتاب أخر .

في أحيان كثيرة شعرت بأن نيابول يواحه العبث في حياة البطل بالعبث في الكتابة ، لم تكن الأحداث مفككة ، ولكن لغة الرواية ليست سلسة ، السرد فيها يقتصر على حياة السيد بيسواس ، والتفاصيل أقل بكثير من حجم الرواية ( 600 صفحة من القطع الكبير )

ومع هذا أعطيها 5 نجوم .. لم أندم على الوقت الذي بذلته لإنهائها ، ووجدت نفسي في النهاية أضعها في قائمة الكتب التي أنتوي قرائتها مرة أخرى .