Why a Booktrail?
Where does a man call home?
A House For Mr Biswas
Why a Booktrail?
Where does a man call home?
What you need to know before your trail
This is the story of the struggle of a poor labourer’s son growing up in early 19th century Trinidad. Those who live there all seem to have the same dream – to have a home of their own and to find somewhere that they can call home. This is the whole crux of the novel – the difference between house and home and having somewhere to call your own.
A baby is born into a poor family and is given the name ‘Mr. Biswas’ which sticks and becomes his name throughout life This is the life Mr Biswas takes you on in the novel – the search for a place of his own to call home. The people he meets along the way and those who share his Trinidadian heritage flicker in and out of his journey.
Mr Biswas wants to be someone, wants to be something. He is determined to get what so many of his fellow islanders have failed to do.
Travel Guide
Post-colonial Trinidad.
This is a nation finding its new identity post-colonialism. The social and political order has not yet been established and so people there are trying to find their way in the new world.The old and failing social order is going into free fall. There’s religion, politics and social mores mixing and merging into one.
The theme of the island is struggle – struggle for a place to call home, struggle for independence and freedom and the realisation that the rocky road ahead is fraught with challenges to conquer.
The house on Sikkim Street
As a boy he had moved from one house of strangers to another: and since his marriage he felt he had lived nowhere but in the houses of the Tulsis, at Hanuman House in Arwacas, in the decaying wooden house at Shorthills, in the clumsy concrete house in Port of Spain. and now at t the end he found himself in his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. than he should have been responsible for this seemed to him, in these last months, stupendous”
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: A House For Mr Biswas
Author/Guide: V. S. Naipaul Destination: Trinidad, Port of Spain Departure Time: WW2
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