ABSTRACT:
Vikram Seth's "Two Lives", published in 2005, is an immediately intriguing volume centred on questions of expatriate diasporic identity, not easy to place spatially or culturally within the globalising literary economy of the early twenty-first century. It is a work of non-fiction, set mostly in Germany and England, which chronicles the lives of two of Seth's own relatives across the second two-thirds of the twentieth century, in a bulky and profusely illustrated tome weighing in at (in the British edition) 503 pages. The text-as-history character of the book and the mostly linear narration might suggest an unproblematic read, but there is nothing naïve or simplistic about this work: rather, it raises complex issues concerning the relationship between text and history, while also exploring issues of belonging in terms that ultimately point beyond the very category of postcolonial writing into which Seth's volume apparently falls.
(nb: this chapter is in vol. I of a 3-volume set)
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This text has also been published on-line in a longer version (see URL above), under the revised title: "The multicultural in Vikram Seth's TWO LIVES: 'history writ little'or global protagonism?".
