Very long - overly long - story in which the gormless title character pretty much fails at life, over and over again. Born to an impoverished Hindu family in the West Indies, Mr. Biswas - and the book, which covers his entire life, refers to him as Mr. Biswas from birth (which is the most amusing thing about it) - marries at a young age into a family like a hydra: many-headed and suffocating. Mr. Biswas and his equally young bride barely know each other and are desperately ill-suited. Worse, her family is deeply overbearing. In fairness, though, they kind of need to be, as Mr. Biswas is so generally useless, so consistently ineffectual, that if the in-laws didn't overbear his wife and children would likely end up starving and homeless. Mr. Biswas is deeply resentful of this interference, and if there was any part of me that liked any part of him I might care... but there wasn't so I don't. Along with all his other poor qualities he's a mean-spirited, hurtful little man, but frankly pretty much every character in this book is mildly awful, so while I enjoy the thin strain of wry black humour and the cutting observations I'm just not emotionally affected by it in any way.