Mr. Biswas
is probably the most finely delineated character in all the books that I have
read for this list. My edition of A House
for Mr. Biswas is over 560 pages,
and almost everyone of those pages is spent in the presence of Mr. Biswas,
covering the entire scope of his life, from the day of his birth to the day of
his death 46 years later. V.S. Naipaul
puts aside a large character arc in favor of what feels like a most detailed
character study. As readers, we are
allowed unlimited access to Mr. Biswas, no matter how ugly his behavior or how
sweet his motivations. The end result
of this access is that Mr. Biswas takes on all the dimensionality of someone
made of flesh and blood.
Mr. Biswas
struggles his whole life to find his own way in the world, and usually without
grace or gratitude toward those around him.
“Born in the wrong way,” Mr. Biswas is up against great odds from day
one. He is apprenticed out to a few
professions and gets booted from each of them.
Eventually he becomes a sign painter, which leads him into the store run
by the Tulsi family. Before he knows it,
he is married to one of Mrs. Tulsi’s daughter, Shama, and he is sucked into the
vortex that is the Tulsi homestead.
Determined to make his own way in the world, he fights against the dominating
ways of the Tulsis, much to his wife’s embarrassment. He moves from opportunity to opportunity,
always ending in failure that lands him back in the arms of the Tulsis. The final symbol of freedom and independence
for Mr. Biswas is a house of his own, not one of the mud shacks that the poor
construct as shelter, but a fine home of wooden beams and concrete steps. In his search, he is nearly driven to madness
before he winds up in Port of Spain and becomes a journalist.
The book is
simultaneously hilarious and painful.
Mr. Biswas feels smothered by the Tulsis and lashes out at them and his
wife whenever he feels defensive and worried, which is most of the time. His children are at first strangers to him,
when Shama takes them to the Tulsis to escape her husband’s various
failures. We watch him work his way into
their hearts in his own awkward way, and we watch as he parents in fits of
kindness and unrelenting discipline. We
the readers are eventually put in the position of family members, sharing their
embarrassment at Mr. Biswas’s
antics. At the same time, there
is a genuine love for Mr. Biswas, and we can clearly see the accomplishments
hidden in the failures. He does, as he
says, “paddle his own canoe” under the watchful eyes of those who actively wish
to see him fail. We cannot help but
admire his tenacity and determination, rooting for him and feeling for him,
wanting him to find some peace and success before he dies.
I know that
Naipaul drew inspiration from his father in creating Mr. Biswas and his
story. To what extent he drew on his
father’s biography is unclear to me, but the novel feels like an exploration, a
searching to understand a man who was a tremendous force, but a complicated
one. There is a lot to dislike in Mr.
Biswas, and the strength of Naipaul’s narrative is his refusal to shy away from
any of that ugliness. Mr. Biswas is
neither romanticized nor vilified, which makes him take on the third
dimensionality of real life. As Anand,
Mr. Biswas’s son, becomes a more prevalent character in the final part of the
novel, the relationship between father and son is beautifully drawn, and in the
end quite touching and painful.
There is so
much to admire and analyze in this book.
Naipaul brings Trinidad through the first half of the twentieth century
to full life in a fantastic feat of world-building. He has themes that bind the narrative
and connect the larger cultural shifts
in Trinidad and the world to the Tulsi family.
There is of course the larger theme of the colonizer and the colonized,
how British and U.S. culture imposes itself on the people of Trinidad. But the thing that is at the heart of it all,
the thing that makes this book such a compelling read, is the dynamic character
of Mr. Biswas.
