4 - Mr Biswas finds a home in the world on paper: V. S. Naipaul

Summary

When V. S. Naipaul writes his life story, a subject to which he compulsively returns, that story always has two cornerstones: how he came to be a writer and his father. The two are intimately related: Naipaul, looking back, marvels at how far the boy in colonial Trinidad had to travel in order to become the published writer, and he considers his literary ambition to be his greatest legacy from his father, Seepersad, who had been a journalist and had published a collection of short stories. The son even received his original subject matter from his father, who had urged him to take his, Seepersad's, life as the theme for a novel. That novel became A House for Mr Biswas (1961), which tells how a man utterly without a story nevertheless fashioned his life into a story by making his son into the writer who could write it.

Naipaul's novel, like Soyinka's, is a son's fictional portrait of his father. The two fathers are almost exact contemporaries: in 1938 Mr Biswas is 33, Akinyode Soditan 32, and both have infant children. Both live their entire lives in a British colony, receive a colonial education, and are defined by their relation to the world on paper. Their experience of the world of writing is that, as it widens their horizons, it threatens them with a sense of personal irrelevance.