A House for Mr Biswas
by VS Naipaul
A man spends his whole life trying to own one room.
For you if
you want to understand the colonial subject's hunger for dignity through one man's entire life
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Mohun Biswas is Indo-Trinidadian, born into poverty, married into a large family that swallows him, and spends forty-six years of his life trying to own a house — some small piece of the world that belongs to him. Naipaul wrote this in 1961 as a dispatch from inside the Trinidad his father's generation knew — the sugar estates, the Indian indenture system, the colonial hierarchy that determined what a man like Biswas could aspire to. The funniest and most heartbreaking novel on this shelf. One of the greatest novels in the English language.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Trinidad • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Trinidadian author
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