Ein Haus f©ơr Mr. Biswas Roman (Original 1961; 2001. Auflage)

This book is big and colourful and funny, but also tragic. We begin the book with Mr Biswas on his deathbed in his house, and then spend 600+ pages finding out how he got there. He's a man who accidentally falls into marriage, various careers and a terrible extended family. He moves from house to house in the course of a life that never quite turns out as he plans. It's very vividly written. ( )

Feels good to get out of America once in a while. ( )

Long and worth the time. It feels good to get out of America once and a while. ( )

This was another one of the novels I read for Time's Top 100 Novels List. It was, ultimately, disappointing. The book stars strong and then fades for the next 3/4 of the 1st part. Then, it picks up in the second part considerably (until about the halfway mark) and then drops off again, leaving me as a reader a little puzzled and discouraged with what has been written here. Overall, I did not feel that attached to the story and the prose was a little off-putting to say the least.

2 stars- not recommended. ( )

A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul is one of the finest books I've ever read. With beautiful prose, dark humour, and an almost eerie gift for capturing personalities, I find it no surprise that Naipaul is a Nobel Prize winner, and that his books are beloved.

Mr. Mohun Biswas, whose parents emigrated from India to Trinidad, is a simple man in most respects. He is intelligent, a worrier, short of temper, with a non-stop commentary on how the world in general has wronged him. He begrudges his in-laws their home and takes no interest in the fact that they provide him with free board, and that they lessen his perennial penury. What Mr. Biswas wants more than anything is his own house, one that he owns, one where he can be king of the castle. He has no idea how to go about attaining his desire; he tries once, but has a house built so poorly, so inexpertly, that it falls down in the first wind and rain storm it encounters. The house is representative of Mr. Biswas's life - he is forever doing things in half-measures and failing to understand that without passion, he is never going to attain his dreams. His life, like his house, collapses in a series of mishaps which are mainly his own fault.

Mr. Biswas has opportunities. In turn, he becomes a pundit (a Caribbean usage of the word pandit, meaning Hindu priest), a shopkeeper, and a journalist, but with his sense of entitlement and deep-rooted ability to mess up everything he is given, his careers fail, his pocketbook suffers, and he and his family practically become itinerant, nomads of the desert of rooms and houses belonging to somebody else.

A House for Mr. Biswas succeeds because the title character, while feckless and annoying, deeply selfish and ungrateful, is also the underdog. Everybody cheers for the underdog. Even as we often despise Mr. Biswas and his actions, we keep hoping that next time he will succeed - his career will take a swing towards the positive; he'll be able to buy that house he dreams of. So we follow him, impatient with his mannerisms but still wishing him well.

What I in particular liked about this book was its slow pace. The employees at the newspaper where Mr. Biswas is employed go home for lunch and a long afternoon nap and return to work when the day begins to cool, because it's too hot to act in any other fashion. So the book is paced, taking longer than I usually like to explain things, because that's the way life unfolds in the tropics, turtle-slow and suffering the heat.

A House for Mr. Biswas entered that rare category for me: the instant favourite. It's in a class by itself, and I can't wait to read more of his novels. ( )