His birth ill-omened, his life dominated by fitful, comic struggles and resentful truces with those to whom he is obligated, Mr. Mohun Biswas of Trinidad, toward the end of his forty-sixth year on earth, triumphantly purchases his own house and becomes his own man. Around this supremely simple story, V. S. Naipaul builds one of the few virtually perfect novels in our language, a book that is—in the balance struck between its small incidents and its large, overarching patterns, in the ironic beauty of its prose—at once compelling, mysterious, and classical. It is also one of the few novels in any language that transcend their own genre. By the end of we are reading a tremendous parable about the individual self in its enslavement to time and change, and in its search for freedom.