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Novel

The Golden Gate

Vikram Seth · 1986

Synopsis

In San Francisco in the early eighties, John Brown, a brilliant and lonely computer engineer, confides his boredom to Janet Hayakawa, a sculptor and drummer, his former partner. To help him, she places a personal ad without his knowledge, and a lawyer, Liz Dorati, answers it. Around the couple that forms revolve Phil, a divorced man who is raising his son and campaigns against nuclear weapons, and Ed, Liz's brother, a Catholic tormented by his homosexuality; love affairs begin and end.

Context

The novel appeared in New York from Random House in March 1986. It comprises 590 fourteen-line stanzas in tetrameters, on the form that Pushkin invented for Eugene Onegin: the author, then a doctoral student in economics at Stanford, had discovered it in a bookshop while comparing two English translations of the poem, among them that of Charles Johnston. He explains this choice in a few stanzas of the book itself, where he defends the tetrameter against the dominance of the English pentameter.

Who it is for

A novel written entirely in verse; the constraint is soon forgotten, and the French translation renders it in alexandrines.

Prizes and reception

Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1988; praised by critics on publication; Gore Vidal saw in it the great novel of California, written in verse.

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