V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas **** 1/2

There are many reasons why I shouldn't like A House for Mr Biswas. It covers a long time period (Mr Biswas' entire life), the main character is helpless and often obnoxious, and the subsidiary characters are overly broad for comic purposes. Despite the odds, though, I really enjoyed it.

The book has two major virtues. First, it paints a vivid (and savagely comic) portrait of life for Indian emigrants in colonial Trinidad. It travels from the poor countryside to the capital's high society, meeting people from the whole spectrum. Second, Naipaul has fantastic control over the tone even as the story veers between comedy, tragedy, and pathos. I hated Mr Biswas, I felt for him, I didn't understand his decisions, and I rooted for his success, sometimes all at the same time. I had the same range of reactions to most of the characters over the course of the novel. For example, Naipaul describes the sad state of the titular house and emphasizes how the seller swindled Mr Biswas, but that doesn't contradict the pride Mr Biswas feels in owning it.

In many ways, A House for Mr Biswas feels like a Dickens novel set in the West Indies, with its large cast of colorful characters and its sardonic view of an entire society. 

Richard Henry Dana Jr, Two Years Before the Mast *****

I put off reading this sailor's classic for many years because of its reputation -- and self-proclaimed purpose -- as an exposé of the dreadful conditions for common sailors in the 19th century. I expected a grim and indignant tale. But that's not at all what Two Years Before the Mast is like. It is an exceedingly well-written account of the sailing life and of pre-gold-rush California. It may not be an adventure story, but it offers plenty of memorable adventures nonetheless.

I imagine that many readers would find its details about shipboard life and the cattle-hide trade tedious, but for me Dana paints a complete portrait of a way of life. I found surprising insights throughout the book, all the way to the very end where Dana notes that:

The soundings on the American coast are so regular that a navigator knows as well where he has made land, by the soundings, as he would by seeing the land. Black mud is the soundings of Block Island. As you go toward Nantucket, it changes to a dark sand; then, sand and white shells; and on George's Banks, white sand...

Sailing around Cape Horn among the icebergs, carrying hides on his head through the Santa Barbara surf, curing the hides on the beach in San Diego, dodging the boarding-house touts in Boston Harbor, hauling in the weather cross-jack braces -- it's all fascinating.