Day 85 - Meals

Rice with fried onions and salt. Green onions sometimes.

Pinto beans left in water overnight, then pressure cooked with salt and fried garlic. One bay leaf.

Eggplants sliced and covered with salt, to lose water. Then placed in a tomato and red pepper stew (with onions, oregano and garlic), and covered with mozzarella. Straight into the oven.

White flour and chia seeds. Three loaves of bread. Butter and white cheese. Endless coffees.

A box of chocolates hidden away, otherwise they’ll disappear like a magic trick.

Melon, papaya, banana, avocado, a spoon of peanut butter, milk and water. Blended to perfection.

Book review: A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

A House For Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This novel was one of my book club’s picks – a book club in London’s Eastend that I was a member for 15 years until last year, when I returned to Brasil. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the book club had to be moved online and so they generously contacted me to see if I’d like to participate again. I jumped at the opportunity as I’d never read Naipaul before, and I was also looking forward to hanging out with them again.

I really enjoyed “A House for Mr Biswas” and didn’t think it was a depressing read, unlike the other members of the club. It was a long read, but never boring – it felt like a strange family saga (like a Danielle Steel) except it’s set in Trinidad pre and post-WWII, and it features a large, poor, raucous and maddening Indian family. It also reminded me of magic realism in its absurdities, except it was very real (apparently based on Naipaul’s father’s life); and someone in the club brought up the good point that it’s also like a Dickens novel (the characters even read him.)

We know from the first page that Mr Biswas will achieve his life dream: to own his own house. The novel then charts his beginnings and the successive disasters that plague his life. Poverty follows him everywhere as well as bad luck – the novel’s “comedy”. It’s a misogynistic world, with all education given to boys, and all the slaps and kicks to women. Mr Biswas isn’t better than anyone else – though he’s a bit of a clown figure in his family – but the novel’s biggest success, to me, was making you, the reader, cheer his successes, despite all his flaws.

The characters live through a succession of houses in the novel, with their own faulty, bigger than life, personalities. With time, these houses change, as do the mores and costumes of these immigrants to the island, moving away from their very conservative Indian traditions to a new, Americanised one after the war.

There are some particularly beautiful passages, especially the ones where Mr Biswas and his family get some relief from life’s pressures and their cramped living conditions. It was as if the one basic solution to all their lives was more personal space for everyone! A lot of drama could have been avoided if they didn’t live on top of each other.

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