Human Conditions: ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ by V.S. Naipaul Close Readings (subscription)

In ‘A House for Mr Biswas’, his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz in their first of four episodes to discuss the novel, a pathbreaking work of postcolonial literature and a particularly powerful influence on Pankaj himself. They explore Naipaul’s fraught relationship to modernity, and the tensions between his attachment to individual freedom and his insistence on the constraints imposed by history.

Buy the book: https://lrb.me/naipaulcr

Read more in the LRB:

D.A.N. Jones: The Enchantment of Vidia Naipaul
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n08/d.a.n.-jones/the-enchantment-of-vidia-naipaul

Frank Kermode: What Naipaul Knows
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n17/frank-kermode/what-naipaul-knows

Paul Theroux: Out of Sir Vidia’s Shadow
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/paul-theroux/diary

Sanjay Subramahnyam: Where does he come from?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n21/sanjay-subrahmanyam/where-does-he-come-from