I'll keep this short and sharp, but having read Biswas once already, it lived up to it's billing a second time and some. Mr Biswas might be oft-times pathetic, surly, conniving, and acerbic, but he's a roguish, deeply sympathetic picaresque hero. His attempts at self-actualisation, of finding meaning and security in a world in which he is "unnecessary and unaccomodated", is at times painful to read. Biswas is a book about the difficulties of social mobility, of the fraught nature of family life, about the constant pressures and expectations of society. Naipaul writes brilliantly about anxiety, depression, loneliness, and melancholia. He understands, like Tolstoy, that stress comes in a thousand forms, in infinite variations, that it is experienced entirely subjectively and cripples each individual in a unique way. Mr Biswas' Sisyphean struggles are brutal. They're extreme. He stares the void in the face. But they're also relatable on some level. The sheer absurdity of the Tulsi family, which seems to operate like a repellent social organism, could stand in for so many things, but we've all known something like it at some point. 

Yet, Biswas as a book, is so funny. It makes you laugh out loud. The tragicomedy of Mr Biswas' plight is in the very best of the satiric tradition. Naipaul's stylistic mastery is well-known, but it's difficult to overstate how much you can feel it in this book. His prose is cutting, but also deeply humane. The dialogue, the characterisation, the palm trees, the humidity, the sun-bleached signs and road side kiosks, bring Trinidad alive. In Mr Biswas, in Anand, even in Shama and Savi, we feel Naipaul's own biography. This is a deeply personal book with profoundly universal characteristics. The sort of book which resonates across time, place, and culture. 
I'll read this again and again after that and probably again after that; it's that good.

I finished this by force bc it’s a ‘classic’ and I wanted to be able to pass my own judgement.

There were a few interesting anecdotes dotted around but really it’s boring and has no business being this long.