A House for Mr Biswas

A House for Mr Biswas is a novel by V. S. Naipaul, first published in London by André Deutsch in 1961 and the same year in New York by McGraw Hill. It was the book that first brought Naipaul international acclaim, and the author later described it as the work closest to his own life. He drew on the figure of his father, Seepersad Naipaul, and on the world of the Indo-Trinidadian community of his childhood. The writing took him about three years.

The story follows Mohun Biswas, a Hindu man born in rural Trinidad. From the start he is marked by an unfavourable prophecy from a pundit and by an extra finger, and he grows up feeling an outsider even within his own family. After his father drowns, the household breaks apart, and the young Biswas passes through a series of jobs and guardians before finding work as a sign-writer. A misunderstanding leads him to marry Shama, daughter of the large and domineering Tulsi family, and to live under their control in a great, decaying house.

The heart of the book is Biswas's struggle for independence. Against the communal, hierarchical world of the Tulsis, which offers him a secure but subordinate place, he aspires to shape a life of his own. His longing for a house of his own becomes a symbol of that autonomy and of an authentic identity. Across the narrative he tries several times to build or acquire a home, with varying degrees of success, and his gradual progress is traced partly through the many possessions he accumulates, catalogued in meticulous inventories.

The novel can be read as a portrait of a colonial world fading away, seen from a postcolonial vantage. Its prose is among the most admired in twentieth-century English-language writing. In 1998 the Modern Library ranked it number 72 on its list of the best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and Time magazine included it among its best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. The song "Good Sign, Bad Sign", written for an unproduced stage musical with music by Monty Norman, was later reworked as the "James Bond Theme".