The House for Mr Biswas, an old book

from w
On Tuesday morning I was sorting boxes of books for Rotary Donation in Kind to send to Pacific primary and secondary schols. I came across a book which brought back many memories - House for Mr Biswas by V S Naipaul whose books I have really found interesting over the years. It was a book with comedy and pathos and one of his earliest. A man from Trinidad, the author certainly reminded me of the Indian people of Fiji. In Fiji there is Brij Lal, Satendra Nandan, Subramani, but Naipaul still stands out as one of the best post-colonial writers of Indian heritage.

An apparently grumpy man, Naipaul was supposed to be a special guest at a Melbourne Writers’ Festival one year and I was really looking forward to seeing him. However he reneged for some reason. I liked his books, the first I read being ‘House for Mr Biswas’ which I found about the time I went to Fiji so there were many similarities with people I met there. Some of his books are:
• A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS, 1961
• THE MIDDLE PASSAGE, 1962
• A FLAG ON THE ISLAND, 1967
• A BEND IN THE RIVER, 1979
• THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL, 1987
• HALF A LIFE, 2001
• THE WRITER AND THE WORLD, 2002

Another occasionally grumpy writer is Paul Theroux who was once a friend of Naipaul. He wrote Sir Vidia's Shadow (1998) an angry and unforgiving book after Naipaul slighted him. Theroux considered earlier the older writer as his mentor but the friendship ended in breakup, which Theroux sealed with his bitter accusations. "I had admired his talent. After a while I admired nothing else. Finally I began to wonder about his talent, seriously to wonder, and doubted it when I found myself skipping pages in his more recent books.’

What reminded me of this book today was the sound of the electric saw in the back yard as Peceli cuts a hole into the wall of a building - a garage large enough to house two cars but only ever used for storeage etc. He is renovating, putting in a ceiling, masonite inner walls, painting, and now putting in a window. The guy next door is probably on night shift with a note on his back door 'Do not disturb'. Anyway it is 1 p.m. so shrieking, grinding, sawing noises in the neighbourhood are surely allowed.