| Vikram Seth didn’t intend to write the biographies of his great aunt and uncle. It was all a matter of maternal prodding.
"I’m rather surprised I wrote it. It was my mother’s suggestion," says Seth, who was recently in Calgary for a reading at the W.R. Castell Central Library.
Seth was in a lacklustre frame of mind, recovering from writing A Suitable Boy, purportedly the longest novel in the English language, and casting around for another project when his mother intervened.
"Stop fussing," she said, pointing out that Shanti Uncle, although in failing health, had had a long and interesting life and needed something to occupy his mind. "It appeared my life lacked direction. It was obviously a match," Seth told his audience at the reading.
What transpired was Two Lives, an examination of "the glue of our lives," better known as loyalty, betrayal and love.
Shanti, who grew up in a small Indian village, had trained as a dentist in pre-war Germany and then left for England, where he enlisted in the army. His arm was blown off at Monte Cassino, but he trained his left hand so that he could resume his career after the war.
He met Henny, a German Jew, when he lodged with her family in Berlin. She escaped and also re-established herself in England. Eventually they married, building a relationship that was long in confidence, albeit short in confidences. In fact, without the discovery of Henny’s postwar letters, Seth says the story would probably have remained in the family.
"It was no longer a family chore, it was something I couldn’t not write," says Seth, who translated the letters from the original German.
The author, whose writing successfully spans several genres, says non-fiction was quite a different proposition from fiction. In the latter, research is used "as kind of a trampoline" for the story, whereas with non-fiction you can cull, select and arrange your facts, but you can’t alter them. It’s the difference between verisimilitude and verity, he says.
Admitting to feeling drained by Two Lives, his most personal book to date, Seth says he’s not working on anything at the moment. He has, however, some thoughts about his next project.
"I am looking at short forms," he says, mentioning plays, children’s books and poetry. But it may depend on who suggests what to him, and whether it appeals to his versatile mind. |
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.