About Vikram Seth's "Two Lives" (PDF)

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, , language: English, abstract: migration, and double migration, a diasporic writer is
challenged and ruptured by the multiplicity of ambivalent
affiliations of language, class, race, gender and sexuality. The
writer often tends to deal with these affiliations as a mode of
postcolonial grand narrative¹ exposing the theoretical clichés
of marginalization and resistance. But a writer of a much
greater sensibility transcends these issues and moves
towards a global narrative of reconciliation and resolution. A
master of every genre - whether it is poetry, novels, libretto,
travelogue or children book - Vikram Seth's Two Lives²
exhibits refreshing change in the postcolonial narrative
technique. A masterful fusion of biography, memory,
autobiography, documentary, history, fiction and essay like
excursions, it resists theory biased theme of cultural
resistance and gravitates towards a narrative of global
resolution. Deeply entrenched in the history of Second World
War it is a powerful reminder of the horrors and trauma of
the War. Two Lives does not do quite what is expected of a
postcolonial narrative or of an English novel in the tradition
of Jane Austen (as Seth's magnum opus A Suitable Boy³ is
considered).A cosmopolitan4 story, narrated by a truly
cosmopolitan writer, It resists any branding of an Indian
writing in English.