Please excuse my absence from the blog: for the past several weeks, I've made my way through A House for Mr Biswas, the hulking work -- and one of the first works, I should add -- of V. S. Naipaul.
It's not often that you have the chance to read a novel like this: one with a sweeping account of time and place, and which charts generations of a single family. Mr Biswas is this: an epic account of Trinidad through the Second World War and beyond.
But what sets Mr Biswas apart -- beyond the family stories and the vast number of primary and secondary characters -- is its focus on the home. I can't remember another novel so preoccupied by this idea, by its meaning, its presence, its immovability.
This, after all, is the quest Mr Biswas is on: to find a place of permanence for himself and his family; to catalogue all that is tactile in his life, to protect it. Mr Biswas achieves this, but his journey is a long one: so long in fact that, by the end, the home does more than protect the tangible; it envelopes memory, too.
And that, I think, is the magic of Mr Biswas: this huge, lurching novel in which characters travel significant emotional distances, but remain, by and large, close to home, near to where they started. Over time, the very definition of that word -- home -- changes: from a place for things to a place dominated by memory.
The last word is reserved for V. S. Naipaul, who was only 27 years old when he finished Mr Biswas:
"So later...when the memories had lost the power to hurt, with pain or joy, they would fall into place and give back the past."
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