In 'A House for Mr Biswas', his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz in their first of four episodes to discuss the novel, a pathbreaking work of postcolonial literature and a particularly powerful influence on Pankaj himself. They explore Naipaul’s fraught relationship to modernity, and the tensions between his attachment to individual freedom and his insistence on the constraints imposed by history.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.
Read more in the LRB:
D.A.N. Jones: The Enchantment of Vidia Naipaul
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n...
Frank Kermode: What Naipaul Knows
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n...
Paul Theroux: Out of Sir Vidia’s Shadow
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n...
Sanjay Subramahnyam: Where does he come from?
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n...
Subscribe to the LRB and get up to 75% off the cover price: www.mylrb.co.uk/
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail - from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.