Amitava Kumar and the Novel of the Translated Man

I thought often of “A House for Mr. Biswas” while reading Amitava Kumar’s new novel, “My Beloved Life” (Knopf). Kumar, who has written eloquently about his complicated indebtedness to the Indian Trinidadian writer, here tells the story of “an ordinary life”: one that, in its Biswasian quietness, might not seem to claim the loud space of a novel. Jadu Kunwar, Kumar writes of his gentle hero, “had passed unnoticed through much of his life.” His experiences “would not fill a book; they had been so light and inconsequential, like a brief ripple on a lake’s surface.” The realization that Kumar, like Naipaul, might also be writing a fictionalized version of his own late father’s life breaks like a slowly cresting wave over the sad and joyful ground of this story.The Best Books of 2024