Two Lives - Vikram Seth

A Winter Word

Cold cold friend, Frost-

Night comes, and I

Am dispossessed.

Most cold, cold

Is this night;

And my youth old,

My spirit lost.

I cannot rest.

I walk alone.

Frost, burn upon

My every bone.

• *  - Vikram Seth

The cold of the seasons, or the cold of life, old age? Is this how one feels when in the winter of your life, you are left all alone, your children settled, your partner gone? For sure, this is how Shanti Seth must have felt, when Henny died. Shanti and Henny were Vikram Seth's great uncle and aunt, who took him in as a teenager, when he went to London for schooling, and where he stayed off and on with the Indo-German couple. When Seth began reconstructing their story, he did so with little sense of where it might lead. By then Henny was dead and Shanti, 85 and in poor health, needed the distraction. In the event, as he sat down, laptop at the ready, to conduct his interviews, it was Seth who was stimulated - and made to grasp how many events and intellectual currents of the 20th century intersected with the lives of Shanti and Henny.

A trained physicist, Shanti made his way to Europe in 1931 to study dentistry, ending up a penniless student in Berlin, stranded in a country whose language he could not speak. He rented a room with Ella Caro in the Charlottenburg district and quickly warmed to her family's young circle. "Nimm den Schwarzen nicht" [don't take the black man] had been the younger daughter Hennerle's(Henny) first reaction to her mother's lodger, an ironical prejudice, given the imminent rise of the Third Reich. But they were not to know that there would develop a relationship between them that would last more than five decades, and survive Holocaust and second Wrold War.

At one point in the novel, Henny's story takes center stage, thanks to a bunch of letters Seth discovered after her death. And herein lies one of the most fascinating sections of the book. Henny's family was Jewish. In the happy days when Shanti shared their Berlin home, they(Henny's mother Ella, sister Lola, and brother Heinz) enjoyed a comfortable middle-class existence. But as Hitler's power rose their lives were gradually crushed. Henny and her brother finally fled, she to England and he to South America. But Lola remained in Berlin with their mother. It was only after the war, through her friends' letters, that Henny learned that both had perished in concentration camps. But there was more, which I am not going to divulge here.

"Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village on this middling planet of a trivial star . riches are to be found." Says Seth, and riches are indeed there to be discovered in the story that Seth offers up. More than once, Seth worries that he has betrayed them, by making their private lives public; she especially might have disapproved. But his motives are generous, and the breadth of the canvas is ample justification.

In the hands of a lesser writer, the story might have seemed little more than interesting. Seth, with his beautifully simple prose(am I repeating myself?), creates an unforgettable portrait. He writes about intricate, tiny day to day details, then broadens our horizons to include Nazi Germany. The book also delves into thoughts about love, courage and friendship, betrayal through opportunism and moral cowardice, and those acts of spontaneous generosity which are all that is left to maintain faith in humanity. Another positive was the level of involvement Seth had in the narration. He might have started the biography as a project to occupy his great uncle's time and attention, but soon it turned into a catharsis for him as well, not to mention that he found a subject to write about post A Suitable Boy. In fact, the first 50 odd pages are almost autobiographical, so much so that the book might have been titled Three Lives. You are strangely moved when he says how he was unable to read or sing in German post his research about Holocaust victims, and how, subsequently, reading Henny's letters depicting the gossip of day to day lives about her friends healed him. But where the biography scores, for me at least, is when Seth depicts the research, the process of writing a biography, which, however effortless it seems, is not. The interviews, endless reading, research to find what happened to Lola and Ella is fascinating, and makes the reader involved with the book, more than it would have, had it been a dispassionate narrative.

Henny and Shanti married too late to for children. What they had was an author for a great-nephew, an almost son. And he, through Two Lives, has ensured that their lives do not fade into obscurity.

This is a wonderful book..its has practically every possible human emotion..Seth does a great job of intermingling the characters and dives back in time with seamless ease..The novel based on true life story of his uncle and aunt set in Germany of mid -1930's and Britain from 1940's onwards..the story is revealed through family archives, letters and conversations with his uncle (sadly after his aunt's death - so its probably one side of the story)..The wonderful message of how a relationship blossoms in the backdrop of challenging times of the 2nd World War..there are anecdotes of Germans finishing of the Jews that make you wonder how hatred can make people do such dastardly acts..there are sections devoted to the War as well in Italy and Africa where Seth's uncle worked with Dental core.A life full of challenges that inspires every reader of this book to pursue one's dreams whatever the challenges and odds..There are many messages in this book some profound some subtle - this is the real charm of this book..the narrative style is simple and yet captivating..you wouldn;t like to stop while the book is in your hands..

A must read for book lovers and Seth fans..if there is one aspect which I found a bit duanting was the number of letters in the book..it was challenging to keep track of the different people related with these letters..

Happy reading..

Cheers,

Sam72

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 toes in old shoes -- the stuff of life in those terrible years. Henny, safe in England, is filled with sadness and fury, and feels she must ''cut'' those friends whom she learns were not as kind as they should have been during the war, no matter their friendliness afterwards. She also reconnects with the fiance who buried the Jewish half of his ancestry and married a Christian girl while Henny presumably waited for him abroad.

I've already given away too much, but this is the kind of book you yearn to sit down and dissect with good friends. It's rich in detail (you will never forget the account of the Birkenau gas chamber), good-hearted, and important, not only for its wealth of historical and biographical information but for a glimpse into the lives of people who traveled continents, making friends and connections along the way, appreciating the differences among religions, cultures, literature, and music without championing any above the others, and living full and well-considered lives. I highly, recommend it.

But remember one thing while reading this book : Patience is the key.

This book abt all the fascinating things u cud ever dream of doin.It is extreme art of narration which can turn ur minds touch ur soul. Your heart will fall in the river of love and your eyes will pop out with the expression of sweet singing bird romancing a dukkar. When you start reading it, you will sit on a chair doing nothing as if you are in a coma. You will also forget the big gap your chair has. When a dog barks in the book, you feel as if some stray dog is barking outside your window which also brings you close to the reality that life is all about barking like a Dog. As you reach the last page of the book u wont definetly feel like dying as the complete xperience of reading the book is similar to dying 100 deaths at one time. You feel as the author has been thru a worst phase in his life which made hime to write such a book to take revenge and kill ppl with his terrible narrations.

Author has tried his level best to screw up the minds of his readers and make them feel like a rapist who is been tortured to death in tihar jail.