A tender, funny novel written with the verve of Dickens and the passion of Chekhov, set during World War II in a derelict neighborhood in Trinidad’s capital and narrated by an unnamed boy—from the Nobel Prize-winning author. “One of the few contemporary writers of whom we can speak in terms of greatness.” — Newsday “A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say ‘Slum!’ because he could see no more.” But to its residents this corner of Trinidad’s capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. There’s Popo the carpenter, who neglects his livelihood to build “the thing without a name.” There’s Man-man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion, and the dreaded Big Foot, the bully with glass tear ducts. There’s the lovely Mrs. Hereira, in thrall to her monstrous husband. This tender, funny early novel is a work of mercurial mood shifts, by turns sweetly melancholy and anarchically funny. It overflows with life on every page.
Author
Naipaul was born and raised in Trinidad, to which his grandfathers had emigrated from India as indentured servants. He is known for the wistfully comic early novels of Trinidad, the bleaker novels of a wider world remade by the passage of peoples, and the vigilant chronicles of his life and travels, all written in characteristic, widely admired, prose. At 17, he won a Trinidad Government scholarship to study abroad. In the introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition of A House for Mr. Biswas, he reflected that the scholarship would have allowed him to study any subject at any institution of higher learning in the British Commonwealth, but that he chose to go to Oxford to do a simple degree in English. He went, he wrote, "in order at last to write...." In August 1950, Naipaul boarded a Pan Am flight to New York, continuing the next day by boat to London. 50 years later, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad "V. S." Naipaul was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."
