Two Lives [Hardcover]

Vikram Seth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2005

Widely acclaimed as one of the world's greatest living writers, Vikram Seth -- author of the international bestseller A Suitable Boy -- tells the heartrending true story of a friendship, a marriage, and a century. Weaving together the strands of two extraordinary lives -- Shanti Behari Seth, an immigrant from India who came to Berlin to study in the 1930s, and Helga Gerda Caro, the young German Jewish woman he befriended and later married -- Two Lives is both a history of a violent era seen through the eyes of two survivors and an intimate, unforgettable portrait of a complex, abiding love.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In 1969, Seth, 17, came from Calcutta to London to continue his education and to stay with his Shanti Uncle and Aunty Henny. Their relationship became warm, and it is their stories (as well as his own) that Seth (A Suitable Boy) tells in this wide-ranging, unpredictable and moving account. Shanti was Seth's grandfather's brother, a dentist who studied in Berlin, lodging with Frau Caro, whose daughter, Henny, was in love with someone else. He left for Britain in 1936 because he couldn't practice in Germany, but in 1940, as war broke out, he enlisted, served throughout and lost his right arm in combat, a calamity for a dentist. Meanwhile, Henny, a German Jew, arrived in Britain weeks before war was declared, leaving her beloved mother and sister behind to death camp murder. "Vicky" interviewed his great-uncle at length, and part two of his narrative focuses on Shanti. Part three, Henny's story, even more unusual, is based on a trove of remarkable letters she received and wrote (she often kept carbons), many to friends in Germany during the war. Part four examines their marriage (they didn't marry until seven years after the war), and part five details a family mystery about Shanti's will and Seth's complex but beautifully lucid summation of his research into these lives. This lovely book, "memoir as well as biography," examines great and fearful events seen through extraordinary lives. In clear and elegant writing, Seth explores the macrocosm through the microcosm, resulting in a most unusual, worthwhile book. 3 8-page b&w photo inserts.
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From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–At 17, the Indian-born author left his homeland to study at Oxford. He lived with his aunt and uncle, a middle-class English couple in every way except one–his Uncle Shanti was Indian and his Aunt Henny was a German Jew. Through interviews with his uncle and a trunk of correspondence from his aunt, he is able to tell their story. Readers learn that Shanti, a dentist, lost an arm, and that Henny lost all of her family during World War II. They learn the details of these losses and about the couples romance. Shantis story is told first and is in some ways very similar to the narrators. Hennys story takes up the majority of the book and consists largely of correspondence from before the war until several years after. Hers is mostly a Holocaust story that tells as much about the culture of the time as the woman herself. Finally, they marry, more out of convenience than love, but they stay contentedly together for more than 30 years. The final chapter, a discussion of their estate, seems somewhat rushed and tacked on after the slowly paced narrative that came before. Photographs are scattered throughout. The book is lengthy, but each fact shared is an important building block in telling the tale of this couple in the context of their era. A richly rewarding story.–Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Harper; First Edition edition (October 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060599669
• ISBN-13: 978-0060599669
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,341,473 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Connections among all cultures -- and a GREAT read!, November 8, 2005

By 

a reader (Clemson, SC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Two Lives (Hardcover)

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, highly recommend it.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A book of quiet virtues, November 26, 2005

By 

PageTurner (Westchester, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Two Lives (Hardcover)

While Two Lives is, on the surface, a double biography, perhaps it is more an intensely personal journey for Vikram Seth-an opportunity to explore the many sides of his uncle, Shanti, and his aunt, Henny, two people who loved and cared for him and were fixed points in his own firmament for most of his life. In doing that for himself, he delivers a subtle, yet affecting gift to his readers.

There have been so many moving accounts written of those who perished or survived during the painful years of World War Two. I was skeptical that another, even if it was written by an author I admire greatly, would add significantly to that oeuvre. That question wasn't answered clearly for me because it was the wrong one to ask. This book doesn't reveal shocking new truths about the Holocaust, although it describes how many of Henny's friends and family were deported to concentration camps, or managed to emigrate, as did she, with great difficulty. This book doesn't rival the best writing about the pluck of young men sent to war, some to die, some to return ravaged or inalterably changed, although it describes how, as a medical officer in Monte Cassino, Shanti has an arm blown off. It does not shock; indeed, it doesn't even touch deep emotional chords in the reader very often, which may be its biggest flaw. What it does do is bring the reader to a place of quiet recognition.

We live in a global society in which people from all cultures are thrown together. We can choose to trust each other, appreciate each other, even love each other, or we can seek the differences between us and use them as wedges. Two Lives is about two people who found common ground. At first, unconsciously, as Seth points out, they defaulted to the surprising similarities between the values of the Indian Hindu and German Jewish cultures, and later added to them a proper dollop of middle class English quotidian. Seth's Shanti Uncle and Aunty Henny built a Wahlverwandten (German for "chosen family") around them, and as it is for most families, it was far-flung, confounded by secrets, replete with fond memories, rife with misunderstandings, and as rich in what wasn't done and said as in what was.

For all of the particularity of Henny and Shanti's lives, they were extraordinarily ordinary, and that is perhaps what makes this book reverberate on such a deep level for all of us. In Two Lives we see in sharp relief how two people never compromised their true temperaments, whatever the circumstances, and as a result built a positive, connected life. If that meant accommodation, generosity, unexpressed anguish, devotion, hard work, so be it. This is certainly not Seth's most lyrical effort; he knows it cannot be if he's to integrate the vast detail of geography, culture, language, and time shifts that span nearly 80 years in a straightforward way. Seth's own raw pain at his uncle's anomalous behavior in his confused old age is just one more example of the book's humanity, of the complicated, unexpected twists that characterize every fully-lived life.

Neither Henny nor Shanti ever forgot their pasts, but move forward they did, and they did it together. What more could we readers ask of ourselves?

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Memoir spanning the whole Twentieth Century, July 1, 2006

By 

Vivek Sharma "Kavi" (Cambridge / Boston, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Two Lives: A Memoir (Paperback)

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 and go rather quickly. Perhaps the idea there was to emphasize the events, rather than personalities (quite unlike in Suitable boy), and the letters, the narrative weaves a heart-wrenching description of Berlin through racial hatred, through bombing, and through division after the war.

Vikram Seth strives to provide a lifelike potrait of both Henny and Shanti. Hence, he strives to outline aspects from their daily routine that he witnesses himself, his other family members perceive by themselves and what he gathers from his conversations with Shanti and from letters of Henny. He is telling the tale of real people, related to him. Only an author of his calibre can create such a rich, likable, must read memoir using these tid-bits of information and working with and against his own personal relationships. Vikram doesn't make Shanti or Henny into just heroic survivors of various tragedies and catastropies. Neither does he magnify their life sagas or characteristics. He provides snapshots of their successes and failings, of their quirks and habits, of the complexity of relationship and marriage, and of their painful approach to death.

Two Lives is overall a great memoir that one ought to read to feel inspired by the protagonists, to become aware of horrors that our grandfathers faced, to understand our present world and to appreciate how well a writer like Vikram Seth can weave a saga from such varied elements. People like me who have read other books by Vikram Seth might be surprised by presence of some obscure parts in the book, but the story itself requires a degree of uncertainity, of vagueness, of incompleteness. If it were fiction, one could have reproached Seth for spending too much time on deaths of protagonists and on their life after 1960s. Especially some of the family disputes could have been pruned. Here in the biography, he needs to pull all elements of their life together, and like he must, he describes events in 1930s and 1940s in greatest detail.

The narration of events in Germany from 1930s and 1940s, the copies of Henny's correspondence during that time and Shanti's personal reminisces about the second world war and dentistry with left hand are transformed into a must read biography by one of the greatest living writers of our times. Go, read it.