7 - Biographic Memoir: Two Lives

Summary

In defiance of the international publishing warning of ‘brand disintegration’, which dictates that authors stick to a single sort of book, Vikram Seth has gone from one genre to another, nonchalantly making dust of publishing wisdom and creating his own marketing precedents. Seth secured an estimated 1.4 million pounds (highest so far for a non-fiction book) from his British publishers for Two Lives, a biography of his great uncle and aunt. News items reported that with this advance Seth was catapulted, at least in financial terms, into the ranks of contemporary literature's very elite (Evening Standard 2003). With increasing regularity in the past few years, Seth is described as “the greatest living writer” in newspapers and review journals. The journey that this study has attempted to map is also a graph of Seth's development as a writer, and his phenomenal success in the publishing market.

Reception

While the hype surrounding the release of Two Lives speaks as much about Seth's literary significance as it does of the continuously increasing and overwhelming incursions of the market into every nano-aspect of contemporary life, it also opens up features of Seth's work that we have seen earlier. Whether poetry or fiction, his work is frequently labelled as ‘international’ and ‘popular’, which its sales-worthiness seems to prove true. For Seth's Indian publishers a book by him after seven years was reason enough to celebrate. Seth's Two Lives was the biggest book of the year 2005, and the publishers praising Seth for his unmatched “range and versatility” said, “he is truly international” (quoted in Mandira Nayar 2005).