Home and home! We review some home / house related books like A House for Mr. Biswas.
A House for Mr. Biswas
Author: V. S. Naipaul
A House for Mr. Biswas follows the life of Mr. Mohun Biswas, who struggles to find his freedom and a house of his own. The son of a poor labourer in Trinidad, Mr. Biswas is forced to live as a guest in one crowded, inhospitable house after another. After his father dies, his family moves in with his mother’s sister, Tara, and he is humiliated and beaten by Tara’s brother-in-law Bhandat. The book looks inside colonial society at the beginnings of great transition.
Invisible Cities
Author: Italo Calvino
‘Invisible Cities’ is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and explorer Marco Polo. The book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo. These poems come across as parables or reflections on culture, language, time, memory, death, or the general nature of human experience.
The House of Seven Gables
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
This Gothic novel tells the tale of a New England (Pyncheon) family and their ancestral home – a rotting home with many gables representing the rotting heart of the Pyncheon family, which carries generations of guilt. The book explores themes of guilt, retribution, and atonement, with suggestions of the supernatural and witchcraft. Interestingly, the setting for the book was inspired by a gabled house in Salem belonging to Hawthorne’s cousin Susanna Ingersoll.