Day Two Hundred and Thirty Five
A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul Page: 564 Finished
The story ends kind of happy, kind of sad but better than I expected. Mr. Biswas wants a house, finally gets it five years before he dies and then almost loses it. But his daughter saves the day and his widow isn’t left homeless. Oh, and it’s really, incredibly well-written. I guess the Nobel Prize it won should have indicated something like that. I really identified with Biswas on one level. His rootlessness. I too grew up in scattered places occasionally living with relatives outside the immediate family. I too had a very strong desire for a home of my own. I wanted to buy my great-grandparents home when I was 19 but that didn’t work out. I wanted to by a house with my friend Kayla back when we were young and single. And now I have a home and I LOVE it all out of proportion to common sense and reality. I love every inch of it so much that I’d be happy if we never moved. I wouldn’t mind dying here. In this wandering age, when young families pack up and move across the country for the slightest of reasons, I’m very happy to remain rooted for the next 70 years. I would like to travel one day, but I always want to come home. Our home is small, with odd shaped doorways and doors that don’t fit. It has a sloping roof upstairs and a crowded, poorly planned bathroom. The bedrooms are small, the kitchen faucet leaky. But it is perfect because I really believe that I’ll get to stay. I don’t think I’ll have have to pack up and leave and I like it that way.