V.S. Naipaul, A House of Mr. Biswas

A House for Mr. Biswas” portrays through a series of homes he had and fairly brief life of a poor journalist turned civil servant in Port of Sapin, Trinidad, in the years before and after World War II. Born into an Indian family whose father worked in the sugar cane estates, Mr. Biswas, as he is called by the author from infancy on, becomes a sigh painter, and at the age of sixteen, is tricked into marrying Shama, the daughter of the large and powerful Tulsi family. From on room in the Tulsi House, he moves into a home he is building in “the chase”, an area near he fields where he becomes and overseer.