Early Christmas Advice.

Here we go, I am going to help you get a bit of your Christmas shopping out of the way.
Here is the scenario.
See, I know that you are perplexed about which two books to buy someone very near and dear to you. So all I am doing tonight is easing the burden a bit.
Have they ever read any Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul?
Oh, if they haven’t they really should.
Seriously.
There’s only about 26 shopping days left!
So... the first book you are going to go out and buy is called A House For Mr Biswas.

This book was a selection in a reading group I once was a part of, and we were unanimous in our enjoyment of it. It was our highest rated of all the books we had read over an eighteen month period, and remains as one of my all-time favorite novels.
It is set in postcolonial Trinidad, and is filled with the wonderful idioms of Trinidadian English.
Mr Biswas' expectations and dreams are not all that grandiose (or so it would seem). I mean, all the poor guy wants is a house of his own, some dignity and privacy... some distance between his own family and the irritations of his in-laws, the pushy, domineering Tulsis.
But all of his efforts seem to meet with calamity. Time after time, through events hilarious, but at times, downright sad, we learn to love to pity Mr Biswas.
We follow him through a plethora of jobs, from sign painter and plantation overseer [Mr Biswas miserable] to hilariously inventive and ever-optimistic journalist [Mr Biswas happy].
We continue to hope his ship will come in, and we stay with him throughout his entire life as son, husband, father, and family man until his final triumph... a very peculiar house of his own.

The strength of the book is in how Naipaul uses humor to portray the un-funny struggle that people in impoverished circumstances face when trying to reach even modest goals.
As such, Mr Biswas' world is presented as realistically bleak as ever, in a novel that isn't.
A poignant book, maybe even flawless.
Then, the second book you are buying, is Miguel Street.

There's no two ways about it... this book is funny. Witty. Endlessly sarcastic. There I am, reading it in the park, and laughing out loud in certain parts, like a bit of a loonie!
At one point, the author calls what he's doing here "sketches". That's exactly what it is... connected vignettes. Observations of the lives that make up Miguel Street, a street in Port of Spain, Trinidad. It is all set down and seen through the eyes of a young, fatherless boy.
It is written with such a clear eye that it seems autobiographical, and here on Miguel Street we see the germ or the kernel of many of the characters that Naipaul would develop further in A House For Mr Biswas which he published two years after this one.
Ah, it is too good. The language, the idioms, the vernacular here are priceless... 1940's Trinidad bursts into view.
A little book with big laughs!
Get these two books for someone you really like. For Christmas.

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