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.
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The Dark Time. - On the Arctic border of Russia and Norway, an espionage war is emerging.
On the Arctic border of Russia and Norway, an espionage war is emerging. The point of contact between NATO and Russia's nuclear stronghold is the small town of Kirkenes. For years, Russia has treated the area as a laboratory, testing intelligence and influence operations before replicating them across Europe.
MIRROR IMAGES
‘A Different Man” and The Substance.”
THE FOOTBALL BRO
Pat McAfee brings a casual new style to ESPN.
OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY
Proximity to wealth proves perilous in Rumaan Alam’ novel Entitlement.”
EYES WIDE SHUT
How Monet shared a private world.
WITH THE MOSTEST
The very rich hours of Pamela Harriman.
HUGO HAMILTON AUTOBAHN
On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow.
TRY IT ON
How Law Roach reimagined red-carpet style.
SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY
Bowen Yang's trip to Oz, by way of conversion therapy and S..N.L.”
SNIFF TEST
A maverick perfumer tries to make his mark on a storied fashion house.