Two Lives: A Memoir

by Vikram Seth

Book Overview

The heartrending story of a two people, a marriage, and a century from the author of A Suitable Boy. . . . " A] thoughtful, evocative, moving book."--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

Two Lives is an extraordinary tapestry of India, the Third Reich and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, postwar Germany and 1970s Britain. Part biography, part memoir, part meditation...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060599677
• ISBN13: 9780060599676
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A remarkable work

This deeply researched and often highly moving memoir traces two small private lives, and in the course of this reveals to us an important chapter in world- history. Indian born writer Vikram Seth at the age of seventeen was sent to London to study. He stayed at the house of his dentist uncle Shanti, and Shanti's wife German- Jewish refugee Henny. Seth brilliantly and warmly relates the story of that time, of how he with the aid of his aunt Henny learned German, and how he later came to investigate their lives. To my mind the most interesting part of the book is the letters of his aunt to her friends and family in German, and later in various parts of the world. Part of the story here is the loss of Henny's family, the death of her mother in Thereseinstadt and the murder of her sister in Auschwitz. Seth also tells the story of the courting and relationship of Shanti and Heddy. He speaks of a love which was not outwardly romantic, but based on mutual respect and consideration. The couple courted for seven years before marrying when they both were forty- three. They did not have children and clearly when Seth lived there he was a kind of substitute- child. He rewarded their dedication to him an affection with an affection and dedication of his own in writing their story. Seth conncects their stories not only with their own extended family's stories but with the history of their time and even this time. I was very much impressed by the great care Seth takes in exploring even minor aspects of their character and story. One of the consequences of his research was that he in a sense knew more about them after their lives than in their lifetime. And surprisingly he may have known more about them than each in some ways knew of the other. I do have one strong objection to the work based on one page in it. In that Seth shows a misunderstanding of the whole enterprise of modern Israel. Because he dealt exclusively with assimilated and assimilating Jews in this work, including Hetty he did not have a real understanding of the centrality of return to Israel in Jewish historical experience. I would too have expected him who so closely, carefully documented stories of the Holocaust to understand that Israel exists in the mind of many Jews as the one place in the world where they could at least ideally be wholly at home and protected. This when the whole world rejected the overwhelming majority of Jews who would have escaped from Nazism and the death- chambers. Nonetheless I wish to repeat that this is a remarkable work and highly recommended. It gives much on many different levels, most of which I have not been able to indicate in this small review. It is a master work and I am sure that each and every one of its readers will be humanly enriched by it.

A Memoir spanning the whole Twentieth Century

Vikram Seth's Two Lives is a biography, a memoir, a novel and a collection of letters rolled into one. The landscape it covers includes India, Germany, England and America, and the timespan includes most of the twentieth century. An Indian Hindu, Shanti comes to Berlin, Germany in the beginning of 1930s to study Dentistry, forms friendships with both Christians and Jews and Henny (who is of same age, and his landlady's daughter) becomes his particular friend. After finishing his studies, Shanti returns to England, where his degrees are not recognized, and he takes exams again. He enlists and fights in second world war. Loses his right arm, and yet battles on with his left hand to become an able dentist again. Henny must part from her family and make her escape to London. Throughout 1940s she bears the news of one killing after the other, as under Hitler, Germans seek out the Jews and exterminate them. Henny corresponds with Shanti who is fighting in the War, and corresponds with friends left in Germany. The stash of letters that Vikram Seth uses and copies in this memoir is a telling tale of what millions of Jews suffered through in the 1940s and thereafter. Henny meanwhile works her daytime job, and in beginning of 1950s marries her lifetime friend and companion Shanti. Henny and Shanti are two lives in focus here. The lives are inspirational, while their times full of war, misery, deaths, separations, and treachery. Through their life stories one comes face to face some of the greatest horrors from previous century. The World War II and action against Jews feature as the backdrop in which the valor of the protagonists and the depth and sincerity of friendships they had with people is tested. Historical perspective provided by Vikram is well researched. The story puts you face to face with not only the pre-1950 horrors, but also raises some important questions about present day world, say Israel-Palenstine conflict and US-Middle East divide. In some places, the book is almost auto-biographical. In the beginning of the story, a teenager, great-nephew Vikram Seth arrives at the house of Shanti and Henny. He sets up his personal association with the two lives in his characteristic witty, simple but effective writing. Vikram Seth is one of my favorite living poets and writers. Having read all his novels, and nearly all his poems, I loved the beginning for it describes the writers own struggles and coming of age as well as how and when his various works were written. While the main story is of Shanti and Henny, Vikram's own story is an interesting third element that makes this memoir worth picking. Yet maybe because the theme is so complex, maybe becuase it is a memoir, maybe becuase it speaks of such turbulent times and for Heeny's life progresses through her own correspondences, Vikram Seth's Two Lives is not as easy and straightforward reading as his previous novels. The story of Henny during 1940s has too many characters, and these come in a

Best read in 10 years

This incredibly sensitive biography of Seth's Uncle and his German wife is one of the best reads I have run across in a long time. The man is a real wordsmith but also incredibly good an piecing together the lives of two very interesting people whose time together spanned pivotal years for the 20th century. It is a very rare event when one gets to learn so much from the experiences of others, especially others you have never met. This is an incredible book that is difficult to describe without ruining it for the reader.

Connections among all cultures -- and a GREAT read!

As I was reading this book I kept thinking what a fascinating (if misleading) cultural document it would make for future generations: the coming together in friendship and marriage of a Hindu from India and a Jew from Berlin . . . in England! And their nephew, years later, retelling not only their story but his own, which spans continents and cultures as if space and language were not barriers. One could get a wonderfully misleading idea of how world-traveled and multi-cultured the average 20th-century citizen was! --But that's not really the point here, just a (to me) fascinating sidelight. Readers of Vikram Seth will immediately recognize the clear, balanced, always kind attitude in the writing. Seth takes the interesting approach of telling his own connection with the characters first, so you meet his uncle Shanti and aunt Henny as middle-aged and old people -- and follow them to their deaths before you learn very much about what brought them together or how they wound up in London as husband and wife. It's amazing that this works as well as it does -- instead of being less interested in them, you find yourself anxious to know how Shanti lost his arm, how Henny escaped from Germany on the eve of Word War II, and how they fell in love and came together. Each story is told in turn -- Shanti's first, then Henny's, and it is another amazing feat of writing that this doesn't become repetitive or confusing. You are carried from India to Berlin to Edinburgh to Italy to London with Shanti, incidentally learning a lot about dentistry along the way (readers of A SUITABLE BOY will smile and settle in, remembering the long discourse on shoemaking in that novel!). Then you are carried, less directly, from Berlin to England with Henny, but the real force of her story (she died before Seth began the writing project, so he never interviewed her directly in the way he did his uncle) comes in letters from her old Berlin "set" after the war. This is an intriguing story, and makes me wonder why we haven't had a flood of novels and memoirs on the topic before (perhaps we have, and I'm just ignorant of them). Henny, whose sister and mother were unable to leave Germany and perished in the death camps, slowly gets into contact with old Christian and Jewish friends still in Germany and learns piecemeal from them how they managed in the war -- who risked life to visit and bring supplies to her sister and mother in the final days before deportation, who disappeared into the cloud of Nazism, dropping old friends, who straddled the awkward line between assimilation and rebellion. We learn of the compromises everyone made, the choices they regretted and the risks they wished they had and hadn't taken. It's a fascinating glimpse into the minds of ordinary Germans after the war -- all couched in the terms of everyday life, from despair over a stolen cachet of clothing to embarrassment at the gratitude of elderly beggars when they are given just a crust of bread to cold toe

Brilliant

The understatement and distance that Seth places between the lives of the 'two live' (aunt and uncle) is the strength of this book. It technically is a story of 3 people as Vikram Seth as narrator begins the journey of putting together the biographies of 2 uncovenetional people who live through a bleak period is histroy and whose lives are touched by history. As ordinary folks the tales are not widely known and it is this usage of understatement that propmts the reader to stay with the story. Indian male, qaulified as a German dentist and then loses an arm fighting in Monte Cassino. Meets old German friend and works to keep up the old college days friendship from Germany - despite her own tragedy. So this book opens pages in history that one knows in broad terms and seeps and draws you in as a witness. he does rescue them from being a mere history lesson as he as Vikram is along side with us in the book. Different genre for Vikram Seth and a novel that has to be made into a movie.