Books – A Life More Ordinary

A father is resurrected by his children in Amitava Kumar's "My Beloved Life.”

- By James Wood

For years I have been haunted by a sentence from V. S. Naipaul's great tragicomic novel "A House for Mr. Biswas" (1961): "In all, Mr Biswas lived for six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance." A sentence, indeed: imagine handing down this summary verdict, and then imagine writing a novel whose every page rises up against the very summation. The verdict belongs to historical time: it tells us that Mr. Biswas's life, seen from above, is knowable only in its very unimportance, as an existence steadily disappearing into the careless comprehension of the cosmos. Historical time tells us that Mr. Biswas's life was not worth writing.

Novelistic time is more forgiving. Naipaul's novel takes in Mohun Biswas's life episode by episode, telling it from inside his protagonist's comprehension, as a story of tremulous ambition and anxiety. How terrible it would have been, Mr. Biswas thinks, "to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated." Naipaul had good reason to accommodate Mohun Biswas in his full necessity, because he was essentially writing the life of his own father, Seepersad Naipaul. Unlike his brilliant son, who left Trinidad for Oxford and did not live at home again, Seepersad never left his birthplace. A multigenerational novel of father and son might bend all the way from the rural poverty of Seepersad's origins in the Caribbean to the sparkling Stockholm hall in which Vidia Naipaul received the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2001.