<< On Wed, 5 Jan 2000, Daniel F. Vukovich wrote:
> From Vikram Seth's first novel:
_Golden Gate_, a novel that would be delightful even if it weren't written
entirely in sonnets (including the table of contents). Seth makes it
clear why people like Pope rhymed long narratives that would make perfect
sense as prose: because they didn't have to. For the pure unnecessary joy
of it. >>
Years ago, I was friends with Vikram for a summer. My then girlfriend (now wife) and I had graduated from Princeton that June, and she had arranged a sort of academic junket to Berkely to study Chinese democragraphy, paid for (handsomely) by some foundation. The daily stipend was more than enough for us to rent a house in El Cerrito for the summer and live like grad student kings. Vikram was participating in the same seminar, which he and Janis characterized asa fraud. They "studied" the morning and then had the rest of the day off.
When we met, I was under the eucalyptus trees reading a book of AE Housemen's brilliant, acerbic prefaces to editions of the classical poets that I had found at a Berkeley bookstore. V and J came up, she introduced him, and he said in his Oxbridge Anglo-Indian accent, Oh, Houseman! and began to quote the better insults from the prefaces. He was studying at Stanford at the time and had a harpsichord, which he played beautifully, in his tiny tenth floor apartment. They had to winch it up the outside of the building to get in in. We spent a lot of time drinking and trading obscure erudite jokes. As faras I could tell, he knew everything. Ater that summer we lost touch. He went on a walking tour of China and bcame a famous novelist.
---Justin