A House for Mr. Biswas

A House for Mr. Biswas
by V.S. Naipaul
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #72, Guardian 1000 Novels

The most interesting thing about A House for Mr. Biswas is how ostensibly uninteresting it is.  Mohun Biswas is born in Trinidad, marries into the Tulsi family, holds a series of jobs, has four kids, and ultimately (not a spoiler, as it's revealed in the first few pages) - buys a house and dies at the age of 46.  The protagonist himself isn't a remarkable man.  He's sometimes a clown, sometimes an intellectual, sometimes ambitious but often buffeted about by stronger personalities.  He's not a great talent nor a man of outstanding courage and integrity.  Many of the auxiliary characters in his life - head of the family Mrs. Tulsi, chosen son Owad, even Mr. Biswas's wife, son, and daughters - seem like they might be more interesting subjects for a novel.  So I continually found myself asking, as I worked my way through the 576-page A House for Mr. Biswas, why did V.S. Naipaul write this book?

There's an autobiographical component to the story; apparently Mr. Biswas is based on Naipaul's father.  It is interesting that Naipaul centered the story on his father (or a facsimile thereof) rather than his own life.  After all, Naipaul became a famous writer and married a British woman; Mohun Biswas never even leaves Trinidad.  But this connection to Trinidad is one of the keys to the story.  Naipaul himself transcended Trinidad and become more of a citizen of the world, but Mohun Biswas didn't.  His life's path took him from the rusticity and superstition of the country to the poverty and industry of the city.  He sees the country shift, the old Hindi values and ethnic segregation dissipating, the children (even the girls!) encouraged to become educated and learn European and American ways.  Mr. Biswas is on both sides and neither.  He is proud of preserving some aspects of the Hindu faith and mocks the Tulsis for dabbling in Catholicism, but he is not pious and mocks the righteous.  He falls in with a group of political radicals and yet has little imagination for treating his wife and female relatives as true equals.  In Mr. Biswas we can see the war between the modern and traditional, the urban and pastoral, that is raging throughout Trinidad.

The honorific "Mr." is applied to Biswas' name throughout the story.  The narrative voice never calls him "Mohun."  This gives the character a dignity that his actions don't always merit; he can be cruel, lazy, fickle, ill-tempered, tyrannical, and even abusive.  But this dignity is absolutely essential to the story.  He is not a conventional hero, and the plot ostensibly has little drama, particularly since Naipaul gives away the ending in the first chapter.  We see Biswas struggling to make his own way, build a career, make a family, and buy a house.  These are somewhat unremarkable actions on the surface, but A House for Mr. Biswas is a reminder that all human beings have a profound struggle.  And despite the title character's brief life, his lack of career success, his somewhat dubious family life, and even the ramshackle quality of his house, the novel is a happy one, with a happy ending.  Towards the end of his life, his health failing, his son still overseas, Biswas' oldest daughter Savi returns and gets a job, which means the family will be able to pay off the house.  "How can you not believe in God after this?" he asks in a letter.  That Biswas is able to live the life he does and, at the end of it, still believe in God, still believe in miracles, is a remarkable triumph.

My father, along with my mother, raised me.  His father went to college, and got an Engineering degree.  He was able to do that because his father (my great-grandfather) had his own carpentry business in Medford, MA.  My great-grandfather was in Medford because his father moved there from Nova Scotia.  A few generations before that, my oldest record ancestor and his family made the long journey from Northern Ireland to America.  I am my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and all my ancestors; I am their biological product, but I am also the product of their decisions and ambitions, and I live the life I do because they  wanted better for themselves and for subsequent generations.  Mr. Biswas (and Naipaul's father) wanted the same, and the existence of A House for Mr. Biswas is a sign that that endeavor was successful, and worthwhile.

A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
read: circa 1993
Guardian 1000 Novels

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  Highlander was on TV, but I couldn't watch it because I had to write a stupid book report on stupid A Tale of Two Cities.

I haven't decided whether I will actually attempt to read all the books on the Guardian list of 1000 books everyone should read, but if I do I hope I like / appreciate Charles Dickens more than I did in middle school; he's on there a whopping nine times.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #37, Pulitzer Prize

I started trying to read the books in the Time 100 greatest novels list a little less than two years ago, and starting the list made me look forward to going to Maine.  My family has a place up in Wells, an old house that used to be my great-grandmothers, with has no heat or air conditioning.  A little way up the road is a used book store, and I was looking forward to picking up a few books there.  I was able to pick up some of the novels I needed, but for one I didn't have to go that far; I found a copy of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey sitting atop an old bookshelf at the house.

That shouldn't have anything to do with my reading of Bridge, but it does.  It was a happy accident that I found the book.  When I finally read it, I found that the novel - really a few connected short stories with a wrapper tale - is a tale of an unhappy accident, a fictional bridge collapse in Peru in the early 18th century.  The premise is that a monk, Brother Juniper, witnessed the accident and wants to research the story of those killed in an attempt to determine how it was all part of God's plan.  He never is able to conclusively do so, but I wouldn't say Bridge is an atheistic work.  Instead, it suggests that God works in mysterious ways and his actions and motives are often inscrutable.  Maybe there are no accidents, but that doesn't mean we will ever understand why.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert Heinlein
read: circa 1994
Guardian 1000 Novels, Hugo Award

I don't re-read a lot of books, but I've read Stranger in a Strange Land at least two or three times.  I wrote a paper on it for high school English class, one of the longest papers I've ever written on a novel. The subject was religion, and even at the time it seemed like an obvious choice; Valentine Michael Smith parallels Jesus Christ, and Stranger in a Strange Land is the story of him creating a new, superior church.

It's been a while, so a lot of the details of Stranger in a Strange Land are fuzzy.  I guess the adjective that comes to mind is "Heinlein-y."  Robert Heinlein has a lot of interesting characteristics as a writer, and even the negative ones are often charming.  He repeatedly suggests open relationships as superior to monogamy.  His male characters often seem like thinly-veiled representations of himself, and his women ... well, it's hard to say.  Some of my friends had a spirited Google Plus debate about whether Heinlein's writing is sexist.  On the one hand, he does sometimes create strong female characters, like the titular heroine of Friday, but they're always ... Heinlein-y.  They are strong, but within certain constraints.  It's like Heinlein has a tension between a liberal open-mindedness and a need to project a Hemingwayesque masculinity.

I'm not explaining this very well; it's hard to explain.  Just read one of Robert Heinlein's books.  You might as well start with Stranger in a Strange Land; it's his best.

The Name of the Rose

The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
read: circa 2006
Guardian 1000 Novels

I read The Name of the Rose a few years after Foucault's Pendulum.  I don't remember as much of it, and I didn't like it as much, but they did make it into a movie with Sean Connery, so there's that.

Foucault's Pendulum

Foucault's Pendulum
by Umberto Eco
read: circa 2003
Guardian 1000 Novels

I'm a smart guy.  I've been smart as long as I can remember.  It doesn't seem like something I can even take credit for; it's just something innate.  And with intelligence comes a healthy arrogance; there are quite a few people smarter than me, but there aren't very many people I will admit are smarter than me.

Umberto Eco is way smarter than me.  The amount of knowledge and research that must have gone in to the writing of Foucault's Pendulum is staggering, and the way he weaves it all together is nothing short of genius.

Foucault's Pendulum, like The Crying of Lot 49, is about conspiracies and their effect on people's sanity.  But while our guide through Pynchon's tale is an every(wo)man outsider, trying to figure out what's going on, the narrator of Eco's novel is an insider, part of a group creating a fake conspiracy.  Casaubon and two of his friends have encyclopedic knowledge of the legends and histories on which many conspiracies are based, and they weave an elaborate "Plan," a conspiracy to end all conspiracies.  It's compelling and exhaustively detailed, and ultimately the characters (and maybe even the reader!) start to wonder if maybe the Plan is more than just an intellectual exercise.

The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
read: circa 2006
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I've read The Crying of Lot 49 twice.  I did not quite understand it the first time, so I read it again.  I still did not quite understand it.  I imagine I will repeat this pattern a few more times over my lifetime.  The Crying of Lot 49 has a wonderful quality where you keep feeling like you almost understand it, even though true understanding for the reader is futile - as it is for the book's protagonist Oepida Maas.  But I still feel that if I read the novel just one more time, I can glean another clue.  Maybe I can piece together what is going on in the chopped-up and out-of-order movie Oedipa watches with the lawyer, or Mucho's LSD-inspired speculation that you can re-create an entire person by the pitch they play the violin, or what in the world is going on in play-within-the-play "The Courier's Revenge," or whether any of the secret postal organizations actually exist.  If I can just figure out one more thing, maybe it will all make sense.  Or maybe not.  Is Pynchon cautioning me against reading too much into literature, or encouraging it?  Or is he just messing with me?

The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels

Toni Morrison wrote the following paragraph in the introduction to The Bluest Eye:

One problem was centering the weight of the novel's inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying her rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing.  My solution - break the narrative into parts that had to be re-assembled by the reader - seemed to me a good idea, the execution of which does not satisfy me now.  Besides, it didn't work: many readers remain touched but not moved.

There are two things of interest to me here.  One is the notion that I as the reader should be interrogating myself for the "smashing" - which Morrison elsewhere in the introduction refers to as "psychological murder" - of major character Pecola, as her self-image and sanity are destroyed under the pressures of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse and the way society perceives her.  The second item of interest is that the arrangement of the story factors into how I feel about the fate of this character.  Taking the second part first, it is interesting to hear an author talk specifically about this element of the craft.  Whether in novel or in film, I often feel that showing the narrative out-of-order is a cutesy trick that makes the story more confusing without really adding more depth.  Morrison's explanation is convincing, though; in linear order the sequence of events that conspires to Pecola's downfall would have felt like a runaway train out of control, almost fatalistic.  Instead we can treat each individual malady that befalls her separately, and wonder what kind of environment she exists in that this can happen to her.

The environment brings me back to the first point, about interrogating myself for personal blame for Pecola's suffering.  I didn't know what Morrison meant, and I probably still don't completely.  But I was in a Baby Gap the other day and noticed that the posters they had on the walls were angelic white children, nearly all with blue eyes.  That's no crime of mine, but I felt guilty when I realized I hadn't even noticed.  Of course the children were white.  Of course they had blue eyes.  How else would they look?  That's the society we live in, boys and girls, and our casual, even unconscious acceptance of it is a big part of the problem.

I have a lot of sympathy for the struggle for gay rights that is going on today.  Aside from the overt prejudice gay people face, I find the denial of self tragic.  Gay folks that are "in the closet" don't feel free to be who they are openly.  I never saw the struggle for African-American rights on the same level.  Black people are black people; it's obvious, and they can't hide it, right?  Then a year ago I listened to Roots on Audiobook, and realized that white slaveowners eradicated African roots from black slaves, taught them they were worse, taught them they were ugly, barred them from practicing their religion, barred them from speaking their own language, and robbed them of their family history.  Malcolm X makes the point powerfully in the first minute-plus of this video:

Morrison makes a strong effort, here and in Beloved, of trying to reclaim an African-American sense of identity, of beauty, of purpose.  There are so many white assumptions that we make in our society; Morrison does a great job breaking these down.