**From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes a tragicomic masterpiece of
social manners in a postcolonial society--and "arguably Mr. Naipaul's
finest novel" (The New York Times). - The book that turned the gentle
satirist of the Caribbean into a major literary figure, in a hardcover
edition with an introduction by Karl Miller.
**
His birth ill-omened, his life dominated by fitful, comic struggles and
resentful truces with those to whom he is obligated, Mr. Mohun Biswas of
Trinidad, toward the end of his forty-sixth year on earth, triumphantly
purchases his own house and becomes his own man. Around this supremely
simple story, V. S. Naipaul builds one of the few virtually perfect
novels in our language, a book that is--in the balance struck between
its small incidents and its large, overarching patterns, in the ironic
beauty of its prose--at once compelling, mysterious, and classical. It
is also one of the few novels in any language that transcend their own
genre. By the end of A House for Mr. Biswas we are reading a
tremendous parable about the individual self in its enslavement to time
and change, and in its search for freedom.