Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth
Born	(1952-06-20) 20 June 1952 Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Occupation	Poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist
Nationality	Indian
Alma mater	Corpus Christi College, Oxford Stanford University
Genre	novels, poetry, libretto, travel writing, children's literature, biography/memoir
Notable works	A Suitable Boy, The Golden Gate

Vikram Seth (Template:Lang-pnb, pronounced [ˈʋɪkrəm ˈseːʈʰ]; born 20 June 1952) is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.

Early life

Vikram Seth was born on 20 June 1952 in a Punjabi family to Leila and Prem Seth in Calcutta (now Kolkata). His family lived in many cities including the Bata Shoe Company town of Batanagar, Danapur near Patna, and in London.

His younger brother, Shantum, leads Buddhist meditational tours. His younger sister, Aradhana, is a film-maker married to an Austrian diplomat, and has worked on Deepa Mehta's movies Earth and Fire. (Compare the characters Haresh, Lata, Savita and two of the Chatterji siblings in A Suitable Boy: Seth has been candid in acknowledging that many of his fictional characters are drawn from life; he has said that only the dog Cuddles in A Suitable Boy has his real name — "Because he can't sue". Justice Leila Seth has said in her memoir On Balance that other characters in A Suitable Boy are composites but Haresh is a portrait of her husband Prem.)

Seth spent part of his youth in London but returned to his homeland in 1957. After receiving primary and commencing secondary education at the Doon School in Dehradun in India, Seth returned to England to Tonbridge School. From there, Seth studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he developed an interest in poetry and learned Chinese. After leaving Oxford, Seth moved to California to work on a graduate degree in economics at Stanford University. He then went on to study creative writing at Stanford and classical Chinese poetry at Nanjing University in China.

Having lived in London for many years, Seth now maintains residences near Salisbury, England, where he is a participant in local literary and cultural events, having bought and renovated the house of the Anglican poet George Herbert in 1996, and in Delhi, where he lives with his parents and keeps his extensive library and papers.

Seth self-identifies as bisexual. In 2006, he became a leader of the campaign against India's Section 377, a law against homosexuality.

Work themes

A polyglot, Seth detailed in an interview (in the year 2005) in the Australian magazine Good Weekend that he has studied several languages, including Welsh, German and, later, French in addition to Mandarin, English (which he describes as "my instrument" in answer to Indians who query his not writing in his native Hindi), Urdu (which he reads and writes in Nasta’liq script), and Hindi, which he reads and writes in the Dēvanāgarī script. He plays the Indian flute and the cello and sings German lieder, especially Schubert.

Business acumen

Seth's former literary agent Giles Gordon recalled being interviewed by Seth for the position:

Vikram sat at one end of a long table and he began to grill us. It was absolutely incredible. He wanted to know our literary tastes, our views on poetry, our views on plays, which novelists we liked.

Seth later explained to Gordon that he had passed the interview not because of commercial considerations, but because unlike the others he was the only agent who seemed as interested in his poetry as in his other writing. Seth followed what he has described as "the ludicrous advance for that book" (£250,000 for A Suitable Boy) with £500,000 for An Equal Music and £1.4 million for Two Lives. He prepared an acrostic poem for his address at Gordon's 2005 memorial service:

Gone though you have, I heard your voice today.

I tried to make out what the words might mean,

Like something seen half-clearly on a screen:

Each savoured reference, each laughing bark,

Sage comment, bad pun, indiscreet remark.

Gone since you have, grief too in time will go,

Or share space with old joy; it must be so.

Rest then in peace, but spare us some elation.

Death cannot put down every conversation.

Over and out, as you once used to say?

Not on your life. You're on this line to stay.

Writing

Travel writing: From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet

Seth has published five volumes of poetry. His first, Mappings (1980), was originally privately published; it attracted little attention and indeed Philip Larkin, to whom he sent it for comment, referred to it scornfully among his intimates, though he offered Seth encouragement.

In 2009 Seth contributed four poems to Oxfam which are used as introductions to each of the four collections of UK stories which form Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' book project.

Novels in prose

The "novel in verse": The Golden Gate (Hybrid)

The first of his novels, The Golden Gate (1986) is a novel in verse about the lives of a number of young professionals in San Francisco. The novel is written entirely in Onegin stanzas after the style Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Seth had encountered Charles Johnston's 1977 translation of it in a Stanford second-hand bookstore and it changed the direction of his career, shifting his focus from academic to literary work. The likelihood of commercial success seemed highly doubtful – and the scepticism of friends as to the novel's viability is facetiously quoted within the novel; but the verse novel received wide acclaim (Gore Vidal dubbed it "The Great California Novel") and achieved healthy sales. The novel contains a strong element of affectionate satire, as with his subsequent novel, A Suitable Boy.

"The Golden Gate, an opera in two acts with music by Conrad Cummings and libretto from the novel-in-verse by Vikram Seth adapted by the composer" is currently (2010) in development by LivelyWorks and American Opera Projects and receives a staged workshop production at the Rose Studio at Lincoln Center in New York City in January 2010.

A Suitable Boy

After the success of The Golden Gate, Seth took up residence in his parents' house back in Delhi to work on his second novel, A Suitable Boy (1993). Though initially conceived as a short piece detailing the domestic drama of an Indian mother's search for an appropriate husband for her marriageable Indian daughter against the background of the formative years of India after independence, the novel grew and Seth was to labour over it for almost a decade. The 1474-page novel is a four-family saga set in post-independence, post-Partition India, and alternatively satirically and earnestly examines issues of national politics in the period leading up to the first post-independence national election of 1952, inter-sectarian animosity, the status of lower caste peoples such as the jatav, land reform and the eclipse of the feudal princes and landlords, academic affairs, inter- and intra-family relations and a range of further issues of importance to the characters. The Indian journalist and novelist Khushwant Singh has said of the novel that, "I lived through that period and I couldn't find a flaw. It really is an authentic picture of Nehru's India." The novel was, despite its formidable length, a bestseller, and propelled Seth into the public spotlight.

A Suitable Girl (not yet released)

Seth has confirmed (July 2009) that he is writing a contemporary novel including characters from A Suitable Boy, to be published in 2013. He describes A Suitable Girl as a "jump sequel", with Lata looking for a "suitable girl" for her grandson.

An Equal Music

Seth's third novel, An Equal Music (1999), set in contemporary Europe, focuses on the lives of classical musicians and their music.

Some readers and critics complained that Michael, the protagonist, was simply not a likeable (or unlikeable) enough character to sustain interest throughout a substantial novel and that the focus on the music for its own sake can be trying for the uninitiated. However, Paolo Isotta, one of Italy's most significant music critics, wrote in the influential newspaper Il Corriere della Sera of the Italian translation that no European writer had ever shown such a knowledge of European classical music, nor had any European novel before managed to convey the psychology, the technical abilities, even the human potentialities of those who practise music for a living

Seth credits his then-partner, the French violinist Philippe Honoré, as inspiring him with the idea for An Equal Music in an acrostic sonnet on Honoré's name in the epigraph:

Perhaps this could have stayed unstated.

Had our words turned to other things

In the grey park, the rain abated,

Life would have quickened other strings.

I list your gifts in this creation:

Pen, paper, ink and inspiration,

Peace to the heart with touch or word,

Ease to the soul with note and chord.

How did that walk, those winter hours,

Occasion this? No lightning came;

Nor did I sense, when touched by flame,

Our story lit with borrowed powers –

Rather, by what our spirits burned,

Embered in words, to us returned.

Seth together with Philippe Honoré marketed a double CD of the music mentioned in An Equal Music, performed by Honoré.

Libretto

The Rivered Earth

The Rivered Earth, released in late 2011, consists of four libretti taking inspiration from the Salisbury house where English poet George Herbert lived and died which also serves the illustration for the book cover. The libretti is written to accompany music by Alec Roth, and quite a few of the pieces were adjusted and rewritten to suit Roth's style. The venue for the libretti are churches, including Salisbury church. The four parts are entitled 'Songs in Time of War', 'Shared Ground', 'The Traveller' and 'Seven Elements'. They are inspired from Chinese and Indian poetry and even George Herbert's house which Seth later bought. They pieces are also accompanied by four pieces of calligraphy in Chinese, Hindi, English and Arabic by him.

Biography/Memoir: Two Lives

Two Lives, is a non-fiction family memoir written at the suggestion of his mother, and published in October 2005. It focuses on the lives of his great-uncle (Shanti Behari Seth) and German-Jewish great aunt (Henny Caro) who met in Berlin in the early 1930s while Shanti was a student there and with whom Seth stayed extensively on going to England at age 17 for school. As with From Heaven Lake, Two Lives contains much autobiography.

Range

Seth's range is demonstrated by the historical accuracy of A Suitable Boy, with the nuanced cultivated-Indian English of the narrative voice and the entirely in-character voices of the principals of the story; the correspondingly accurate depiction of northern California yuppies of the 1980s in The Golden Gate; and his portrait of the world of western classical musicians in An Equal Music. He has continued to produce volumes of poetry at intervals alongside his publications in a range of other forms, including translations from Chinese poets.

A film of A Suitable Boy was slated to go into production in 2007, an earlier attempt at a television serialisation having been abandoned.

Bibliography

Novels

• The Golden Gate (1986)
• A Suitable Boy (1993)
• An Equal Music (1999)
• A Suitable Girl (2012)

Poetry

• Mappings (1980)
• The Humble Administrator's Garden (1985)
• All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990)
• Beastly Tales (1991)
• Three Chinese Poets (1992)
• The Frog and the Nightingale (1994)

Children's book

• Beastly Tales (1991)

Libretto

• Arion and the Dolphin (1994) for the English National Opera

The Traveller [2008] with composer Alec Roth. Premiere, Lichfield Festival July 2008.

Prizes and awards

• 1983 – Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
• 1985 – Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) The Humble Administrator's Garden
• 1993 – Irish Times International Fiction Prize (shortlist) A Suitable Boy
• 1994 – Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) A Suitable Boy
• 1994 – WH Smith Literary Award A Suitable Boy
• 1999 – Crossword Book Award "An Equal Music"
• 2001 – EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Best Book/Novel An Equal Music
• 2005 – Pravasi Bharatiya Samman
• 2007 – Padma Shri in Literature & Education

Notes

• Chaudhuri, Amit (ed.). "Vikram Seth (b. 1952)." The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. New York: Vintage, 2004:508–537.

External links

• Literary Encyclopedia biography
• Emory biography
• Contemporary Writers Biography
• Vikram Seth at IMDb
• 1999 BBC audio interview with Vikram Seth
• "Poetic License" by Cynthia Haven, "Stanford Magazine," May/June 1999
• video interview with Vikram Seth
• 1990 BOMB Magazine interview with Vikram Seth by Ameena Meer