V.S. Naipaul: A House for Mr Biswas (1961)

Edition: Andre Deutsch, 1961
Review number: 593

Like A Bend in the River, a large part of A House for Mr Biswas is about the search for roots in the post-colonial world. Mohun Biswas spends his entire life looking for a place to live which feels like his own, something which is already complicated by his place in the large Indian community in Trinidad. He is poor but of high caste, and this gives him strange relationships with the people around him, especially when he marries into the Tulsi family, rich but of low caste and trying not to become impoverished by the provision of dowries for fourteen daughters.

Mohun Biswas is a misfit by personality, uncomfortable in the presence of others, either desperate to impress or deliberately unpleasant as prompted by his own insecurities. His social interactions are frequently acutely embarrassing, to the reader as well as to those he meets and himself. He has to deal with the guilt of having caused the death of his father (who drowned trying to save him from trouble in a river when he had just wandered away), but this guilt is never explicitly mentioned. This is a clever touch by Naipaul; the drowning is one of the most dramatic episodes in the novel, and remains in the reader's mind; but not mentioning it ensures that it stays in the background, and almost unconsciously helps us to understand Mr Biswas.

Mohun Biswas must be one of the most rounded characters in all of modern fiction. He may be infuriating at times (though the Tulsi family give him a lot to put up with); he may consistently fail to realise his dreams (even the house he buys, in the end, turns out to be something of a confidence trick); but at the end of the novel, the reader feels that s/he knows and understands him.

V.S. Naipaul: A Bend in the River (1979)

Edition: Andre Deutsch, 1979
Review number: 388

Many parts of Africa in the seventies must have been bewildering, terrifying places to live. The driving forces for instability were very strong, based partly on the conflicting feelings of the recently independent nations towards the former colonial powers: hatred of what they had stood for, jealousy of their wealth, and a desperate desire to be as "advanced". The need for the West to provide the status symbols the new nations desperately wanted combined with hatred for those who provided them, together with corruption on a vast scale caused massive instability socially and economically, as the influence of foreign corporations fought the new feelings of nationalism.

Naipaul dramatises this conflict through the story of Salim, a member of one of the trading families of Arab descent from Africa's east coast. When nationalism in his home country destroys the family business, he travels into the interior of the continent to an unnamed town on a bend of an unnamed river flowing through an unnamed country. There, he takes over one of the businesses of a family friend, the man whose daughter everyone expects him to eventually marry.

Through Salim, Naipaul has a character who is both an insider and an outsider: African rather than European, yet still foreign. This means he can be more involved in African society than any European, yet still observe it from the outside. He can stand back from anti-colonial antagonism and also sympathise with it.

With this carefully chosen central character, Napaul tries to convey something of what Africa was like in the mid seventies (the book being written at the end of that decade). He manages to show the reader the Africa behind the corrupt politics, the self-glorifying dictators, the poverty that are the common images of the continent.