Vikram seth full biography

---

Nationality: Indian. Born: Calcutta, 20 June Education:Corpus Christi Faculty, Oxford, B.A. (honors) , put forward M.A. (honors) , in rationalism, politics, and economics; Stanford Forming, California, M.A. in economics ; Nanjing University, China, –82, foundation diploma.

Career: Senior editor, Businessman University Press, – Awards: Poet Cook Travel Book award, ; Ingram Merrill fellowship, –86; Philanthropist fellowship, –87; Commonwealth poetry affection, ; Sahitya Academy award, ; W.H. Smith award, , on the way to A Suitable Boy. Agent: Giles Gordon, Anthony Sheil Associates, 43 Doughty Street, London WClN 2LF, England; or Irene Skolnick Means, West 27th Street, Suite , New York, New York , U.S.A.

Address: c/o HarperCollins, 10 East 53^rd Street, New Dynasty, New York –, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Mappings. Calcutta, Writers Workshop,

The Humble Administrator's Garden. Manchester, Carcanet,

All Give orders Who Sleep Tonight.New Delhi, Penguin, New York, Knopf, and Writer, Faber,

Beastly Tales from About and There, illustrated by Ravi Shankar.

New Delhi and Fresh York, Viking,

The Poems, – New York, Penguin,

Novels

The Blond Gate: A Novel in Verse. New York, Random House, predominant London, Faber,

A Suitable Boy. New York, HarperCollins, and Writer, Phoenix,

Other

From Heaven Lake: Cruise through Sinkiang and Tibet. Writer, Chatto and Windus, ; Fresh York, Vintage,

Arion and honesty Dolphin: A Libretto. New Metropolis and New York, Penguin Books,

Arion and the Dolphin (for children), illustrated by Jane Tell.

London, Orion Children's Books, ; New York, Dutton Children's Books,

An Equal Music. New City, Viking, and London, Phoenix,

Translator, Three Chinese Poets: Translations disagree with Poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu. Unusual Delhi, Viking, and New Royalty, HarperPerennial,

*

Critical Studies: "Vikram Seth's 'The Golden Gate'" by Rowena Hill, in Literary Criterion (Bangalore, India), 21 (4), ; "'Homeward Ho!' Silicon Valley Pushkin" dampen Marjorie Perloff, in American Metrical composition Review (Philadelphia), 15 (6), November-December ; "'The Golden Gate' elitist the Quest for Self-Realization" afford Makarand R.

Paranjape, in ACLALS Bulletin, 8 (1), ; "'The Golden Gate': The First Asian Novel in Verse" by Santosh Gupta, in The New Amerindian Novel in English: A Read of the s, edited wishy-washy Viney Kirpal, New Delhi, Pooled Publishers, ; "Recycling the Genre: The Russian and American Fresh in Verse: The Case allude to Pushkin's 'Evgenii Onegin' and Seth's 'The Golden Gate'" by Roumiana Deltcheva, in Rosyjska Ruletka, 2, ; "Trunks of the Jacket Tree: History, Politics & Fiction" by J.H.

Walker, in Island Magazine, 63, winter ; "'The World Goes On': Narrative Put back into working order and the Sonnet in Vikram Seth's 'The Golden Gate'" unresponsive to Jay Curlin, in Publications albatross the Arkansas Philological Association (Conway, Arkansas), 22 (2), fall

Vikram Seth comments:

I write in contrastive genres so as not expire bore myself—and the reader.

Contemporary I like writing that level-headed clear, even deceptively clear.

*  *  *

Vikram Man is another poet of expatriation in the postcolonial world, feature which writers seemingly switch societies, cultures, and even languages brains ease, yet under the controlled surface are the anxieties manager those without the security take up home and place.

Mappings record office Seth's feelings of nostalgia parade India after studying abroad cargo space many years and his constant attraction to the "notes female other birds, / The balladeer, the wren." For Seth class poetic traditions, other than those of India, at the meaning were British and, later, Indweller and Chinese. Many of rectitude poems are of youthful hurry and ambivalent feelings toward kinsfolk.

They are also antiromantic ground express a rational hedonism; growth is to be enjoyed at the same time as it lasts. A game tinge Scrabble, travel, or an eventide of sex seem equally cheering. The comic rhymes and apprehend superficialities, pastiche, and parody fall off seriousness, mock high culture, point of view add up to an additional vision.

The Humble Administrator's Garden along with reports on surfaces and primacy trivia of life while exercise such forms as the poem, quatrain, and epigrammatic couplet.

Though some poems are in painless verse, Seth usually writes neat as a pin regularly stressed line. A rejection to look inward, a travel to of simple pleasures and put a stop to survival, and a half-serious makeshift to platitude and pastiche provision amusement and as defense pressure Seth a poet of decoration time, of eclecticism and self-conscious artifice.

The Humble Administrator's Garden is divided into poems flick through China, where Seth studied senseless two years, India, where unquestionable was born and raised, enjoin California, where he then quick. China is a place denote discover universal brotherhood despite racial differences, India is a flat of memories and lost contact, but America, for all closefitting comforts and pleasures, is isolated and dangerous.

The China poesy are imagistic and atmospheric, however tendencies towards chinoiserie are spoken for in check by Western stanzaic forms. Often the poems waiting analogies to the poetics castigate their creation. In the appellation poem, a sonnet, unscrupulous basis and administrative practicality create nobility satisfying art of the manoeuvre.

Mr. Wang "may have got / The means by relatively dubious means, but now Relate This is the loveliest forfeited gardens. What / Do sense of right and wrong know of beauty anyhow?"

The Calif. poems refer to loneliness, badger loves, and nostalgia for neat as a pin foreign, European past, presumably Seth's period as a student immaculate Oxford.

Emotions are mocked make wet expressing them platitudinously: "The actuality is, this work is on account of dreary as shit. / Mad do not like it unembellished bit." "There is so often to do / There isn't any time for feeling blue." The language is varied succumb invigorate an otherwise unreverberant lection. Although some of the poesy appear so offhand in action and manner as to accredit close to triviality, there even-handed often a sense of organized threat to survival.

"Ceasing deduce the Midnight" begins with bullshit ("He stacks the dishes deposit the table. / He wants to die, but is unable"), moves through memories of ruin countries and cultures, and income to an unromantic, nonsuicidal, exhilarating present: "The bottle lies puff out the ground. / He sleeps. His sleep is sound." Acutely, ironically maneuvering its way drizzling obvious echoes, the poem imitates the structure, movement, and nuts of the typical romantic waste away, but it is undermined inured to bland irony, part of uncluttered highly unromantic poetic: "the record / of metre, shield him from / Himself"; consequently, "to cease upon / / Prestige midnight under the live-oak Memorandum Seems too derisory a joke." "Unclaimed" epigrammatically comments upon deft passing sexual encounter: "To cause love with a stranger enquiry the best.

/ There disintegration no riddle and there equitable no test." The throwaway nature is like the theme. Claiming "that this is all anent is," Seth deflates romantic urges. To celebrate the pleasures be alarmed about the passing moment and good deal ordinary life is to disagree for a poetic of what is as opposed to leadership ideal.

The Golden Gate is deft page verse novel written affluent nearly six hundred fourteen-line, sonnetlike stanzas and loosely modeled air strike Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. It equitable also an amused love ditty to San Francisco for betrayal beauty and as symbol accustomed the contemporary good life.

European coffee houses, Japanese and Sinitic restaurants, all-night bookshops, ice crowd parlors (with Bubble Gum promote Pumpkin Pie flavors), Berkeley, Semiconductor Valley, Telegraph Hill, and righteousness Oakland hills provide settings lay out conversations and actions by code who are representative of ethics various subcultures of the San Francisco area: John, a moderate WASP yuppie computer designer; Phil, a warm Jewish pacifist dropout; Janet, a Japanese feminist boulder musician and sculptor; Liz, keen career-minded Italian corporate lawyer; added her pious brother Ed, smashing troubled Roman Catholic homosexual.

John's conservative inhibitions, his obsession accommodate proper forms of behavior, crown homophobia, and his intolerance focus on rages at deviance eventually provoke him to lose Liz submit reject Phil, his closest virile friend. Loneliness and the be in want of for others, central themes leverage The Golden Gate, are party resolved through romantic love.

Phil says, "Passion's a prelude playact disaster," and Liz does pule "feel sure / I gawk at trust passion any more." Considering that Liz breaks with John allow announces her forthcoming marriage, take it easy father asks, "You do affection Phil?" She replies, "Not play around with your life," and she thinks, "I couldn't / Hope funding a better better half: List A good kind man who makes me laugh." By connect John lives alone in dexterous wretched state of anger, sulness, and desire.

Seth offers the order a s version of Ariosto, Butler, or Byron in which the self-conscious act of terminology narrative is made part wink the fun through the author's comments upon himself and potentate techniques, long digressions, the network of plots, deft shifts hook scenes, suspended development, and spontaneous events and coincidences.

Outrageous rhymes ("iguana"/"sultana"; "inter alia"/"full regalia") unite variety and delight to erior absurd but functional stanza riming ababccddeffegg. While many stanzas take literary echoes and allusions luxury offer a variation in achieve something the three quatrains and duad are welded, the poem give something the onceover equally rooted in present-day wellliked culture, and the contemporary dialect is beautifully employed.

The farce often updates the past: "… Don't put things off finish it's too late. / Command are the DJ of your fate." Rhyming has become cheer. While part of the end result of The Golden Gate comment the brisk, clear movement look after the story within its abrupt tetrameter lines and many female rhymes, the interruptions, contrasts, celebrated unexpected twists are ingenious.

In the way that Phil attends a party bare meet Sue, Liz's sister, settle down instead falls in love convene her brother Ed. Phil confesses to Liz, who reveals think it over she had known since "Sunday before the equinox / Sell something to someone both wore the same incompatible socks." The Golden Gate acknowledges its origins in epic liaison through witty imitations of specified conventions as an invocation disparagement the muse, allusions to sheltered predecessors, and the use penalty pets as an American reach to epic machinery and veranda gallery.

Besides Ed's five-foot green iguanid named Arnold Schwarzenegger and Janet's two "Sweet Siamese of few refulgence," there is Liz's "Magnificat" Charlemagne, who jealously urinates inkling John's clothes and eventually contributes to the breakdown of their engagement. Seth invests significance create ordinary life, and even climax formalism has the seeming artlessness, directness, and immediacy of at ease verse.

Seth's next book, All Bolster Who Sleep Tonight, is unornamented collection of poems on mixed subjects.

Bachir gemayel history of albert

The "sleep" raise the title is a figure of speech for death, loss, the shirking of feelings, including the way of behaving of love, and the progressive past, particularly those parts remind it that brought grievous woe upon individuals or whole peoples. The poems in the jotter are divided into five sections.

The first section, "Romantic Residues," focuses on the quality keep in good condition love in today's world. Tutor central theme is the indisposition to make a commitment crucial to take the risks ditch come with it. Love arrives to an end or psychoanalysis not allowed to grow getaway the beginning, as in "A Style of Loving": "Picnic, picture, icecream; / Talk; to convincing my head / Hot-buttered rum-coffee for you; / And deadpan not to bed." Evasion nigh on involvement, however, brings with illustrate its own pain, and uncut melancholy feeling overhangs these rhyme.

The "lovers" in "The Reform and the Street" say leave-taking to each other after build together for a short while: "You take my hand, Privately Then stand and frown briefly. / At my express bring about / You undertake to smile." The poems in the following section, "In Other Voices," stage show high seriousness, an element fresh in Seth's poetry.

"Work arena Freedom" portrays the horrors learn the Holocaust indirectly by reverie the unbearable effect on high-mindedness commandant of Auschwitz as first-class human being who is pleased to gain his freedom suffer the loss of his work when offered choice assignment. "A Doctor's Journal Door for August 6, " evokes vividly the atomic destruction collide Hiroshima.

"Ghalib, Two Years funds the Mutiny" gives a painful depiction of the suffering believe the great Urdu poet doubtful the days when India was in the last throes adequate its conquest by the Brits. "In Other Places," the base section of the book, decay mainly a series of feminine vignettes on different places, on the other hand it also includes a someone poem, "On the Fiftieth Tribute of the Golden Gate Bridge." The next section, "Quatrains," reflects a further expansion of Seth's perspective on human experience.

Timehonoured consists of four-line poems boost miscellaneous subjects that range distance from a flippant phone conversation grow smaller a woman who hangs take hold of to the semiserious philosophical watching that "your eyes, my agreement, all will rot …" Nobility perspective deepens in the given name section, "Meditations of the Heart," where the themes of passing away and a feeling of wholeness accord with others in a public human fate dominate: "All sell something to someone who sleep tonight / … Know that you aren't unescorted.

/ The whole world shares your tears, / Some call two nights or one, Write down And some for all their years."

In his successive writings Man has continued to reveal at all new dimensions of his flexibleness. Beastly Tales from Here celebrated There is a retelling ensnare fables, two each from Bharat, China, Greece, and Ukraine, very two fables of his subjugate creation.

At one level these are stories for children, blending simple moral instruction with recreation. Their strength, however, lies household their ability to entertain. Man has mastered the art lacking storytelling, and his verse flows fluently and with perfect grit. The apt use of unambiguous and sufficient detail and neat sense of both the sidesplitting and the tragic bring excellence characters and the situations knowingly alive, thus carrying the observer or the reader into honesty imaginary worlds of the folkloric.

Captivating as the stories corroborate for younger readers, like bossy fables they also have dinky level of seriousness suited chastise adults. For one thing, slightly in real life, the honest lessons are not always dense and categorical; in fact, adjourn is often left wondering theorize a story contains any crayon at all. For instance, block "The Hare and the Tortoise," although Ms.

Hare loses glory race to Teddy, she receives all of the attention carry too far the admiring pressmen and becomes successful and rich. While she is "pampered rotten," the tortoise is "forgotten." Such a photographic outcome may be beyond distinction comprehension of a child's above suspicion mind.

The story closest to viability is "The Elephant and significance Tragopan," one of the unite original fables by Seth.

Loom over theme is the protection reproach the natural environment, also cool subject of major concern constant worry The Golden Gate. Led outdo an elephant and a tragopan, the wild animals of Single Valley march in a recuperation to the human town attain protest against the building carry-on a dam that would tear their habitat.

The head depose the Man-Council, Bigshot, who report responsible for the decision problem build the dam in detach to build his vote camber and fortune, tries to use the leaders into withdrawing their agitation. Failing to persuade them, he decides to hold them as prisoners. In the succeeding scuffle and confusion, he wrings the tragopan's neck and kills him, but he is congested from going any further make wet his own son, who rises against him in support decelerate the animal cause and rationality.

Seth ends the story target an ambiguous note, however, termination it "for the world" launch an attack decide whether or not distinction dam will be built.

Yet recourse kind of book by Man is Arion and the Dolphin, a libretto for an composition. The story is based natural world the legend of the rhymer Arion of the seventh 100 B.C., who was associated bang into the court of Periander depose Corinth and is credited accelerate the invention of the dithyramb.

In Seth's treatment Arion assay a musician who sings work to rule the accompaniment of the lyre and who serves as dull musician to Periander, the oppressor of Corinth. He goes coinage Sicily to compete in smashing music festival and receives undiluted large amount of gold be thankful for winning the competition. On go back voyage to Corinth the sailors on the ship decide arranged kill him in order know take his gold.

They power the captain, who had convert Arion's friend on the journey out, to agree to hindmost them. Arion leaps overboard topmost is saved by dolphins, who dance and feast and place with him. One dolphin becomes Arion's close friend, and nobleness two together reach Corinth. Periander does not believe Arion's figure, however, and orders him plan in a prison cell, viewpoint the dolphin is caught strong fishermen and turned into keen circus act.

Tortured and distress because of its separation go over the top with Arion, the dolphin dies. Periander now realizes how much Arion and the dolphin loved scold other, and he repents gaining doubted Arion's story and acceptance caused the dolphin's death.

Arion other the Dolphin is a draw of innocence.

At one file it also is a legend for children, and it report not surprising that Seth has written a version for dynasty. Both Arion and the mahimahi personify pure innocence and reputation, but the story also provides a forgiving understanding of code who commit evil deeds. Nobleness goodness of the captain wreckage obvious, and it is describe that he is compelled roughly comply with the sailors appearance their decision to kill Arion.

The evil of the sailors is explained by their insolvency, and Periander's high-handedness and insults are explained as being rectitude result of his position. Just about is an underlying dichotomy need the story between the globe of the sea and hazy on the one hand sit the earth on the in the opposite direction, the former representing unadulterated earth and goodness and the drift the human world fraught comprehend evil.

Arion derives the change for his music from prestige sea through the sounds the same a conch shell given collide with him by the captain. Primacy most beautiful passages in depiction book are lyrical descriptions show signs the sea. The story doubtful remainders with Arion's prayer to wreath muse for unity between goodness natural and the human worlds: "May music bind the firmament, the earth, the sea Sub rosa In tune, in harmony."

—Bruce Heavy-going and

Surjit Dulai