A House for Mr. Biswas is a novel written by Vidia Naipaul in 1961 that tells the story of Mohun Biswas, a man living in colonial Trinidad who searches for a home of his own. At the start of the novel, Mohun is born into a large Hindu family that is suspicious of education and traditional ideas of success and achievement. As a result, he struggles to fully connect with anyone in his family or greater society during his childhood and adolescence. After losing his job at a local newspaper due to a disagreement, Mohun travels to Port of Spain where he forms a bond with a local shopkeeper and together they plot to purchase a house for Mohun's family. Unfortunately, the Biswas family is plagued with unfortunate financial circumstances and increasingly poor health, forcing Mohun to make multiple attempts to buy a house for himself, with varying results. Meanwhile, Mohun is struggling to find a place to call home, a quest that is made even more difficult due to his family’s poverty and his own disruptive attitude.
Throughout the course of A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul follows Mohun's journey as he attempts to purchase, build and live in a house of his own. Throughout his struggles and triumphs, Mohun begins to mature and learn more about himself and the society in which he lives. At the same time, readers get to experience Trinidad during the period of colonisation, with all the racial and cultural tensions that come with it. Eventually, Mohun is successful in his quest to build a small and humble house, but he isn’t able to receive the help he needs to keep up with his neighbours’ successes, leading to the creation of two different classes of people: the black “outsiders”, and the middle class “insiders”. Naipaul is able to portray these characters and their respective lives with a realism and sensitivity that add to the overall power of the novel.
Throughout A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul uses the theme of home and identity to investigate both colonial and post-colonial life in Trinidad, focusing on the emotional impact of both on the characters within the novel. In exploring these ideas, Naipaul looks at how a person's identity comes not only from their race or class but also from their experience of home. In addition, Naipaul shows how finding one’s identity is an ongoing journey and how it is not always possible to do so through a single “home”. By doing so, Naipaul avoids providing a neat and singular solution to Mohun’s search, instead hinting at the complexity of identity in the post-colonial Caribbean.
A House for Mr. Biswas remains a thoughtful and powerful novel, even more than 50 years after it was published. Naipaul’s skillful writing allows audiences to intimately connect with the novel’s characters and their struggles, while also looking at larger questions of identity and home. With its masterful blend of realism, post-colonial themes and right to the point writing, A House for Mr. Biswas is a must-read classic.
