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.
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin April 08, 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin April 08, 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.