Two Lives

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The story delves intricately into the ups and downs of the lives of his uncle and aunt. The text is frequently interspersed with photographs, letters, anecdotes based on Shanti’s interviews with the author, and other sources. At first glance, the lives of Mary Louise Quarry and Emily Delahunty couldn't seem more different. Mary Louise, an Irish farm girl and the heroine of "Reading Turgenev" has lived in a home for the mentally and emotionally disturbed and impaired for the past thirty-one years. Repressed and emotionally fragile, the only experience Mary Louise has ever had of love, despite an early and ongoing marriage, revolves around her dying cousin, Robert, who lived with his mother in a crumbling Irish country house and who shares his love of Turgenev with Mary Louise. C. E. Antarova was performing a lot with symphony orchestras. Her artistic and social activities broke suddenly when she lost her husband in the Stalin’s Gulag.

He admired these two people and very close to them. So when they died he wanted to write a tribute to them Seth gives a masterful summary of German culture and Germany's contribution to history - both positive and negative -, but admits that his study of the horrors of Nazism for the book poisoned his appreciation of the German language for years afterwards. But as a reader (and human being) who learned to love the characters deeply, I found that this book can be very hard to take in emotionally. True to his pattern, William Trevor writes of significant struggles that are both contemporary and timeless. And his characters live through agonies that they sometimes grow through---and sometimes do not. Their own strengths and weaknesses are tested by the capricious storms of life that are not always within those characters powers to control. And that can be agonizing, as we all know.But as they do, Trevor reveals each one. And we watch Emily fracture, slowly, with each grappa, each memory, each dream. Trevor earns his readers‘ trust and time with every line. A book I will have to reread though I rarely ever do so. This is an intimate book as it concerns the author himself and people related and well-known to him. It is also a process of discovery during which we accompany the author from his first encounters with the couple whose lives are described here and his gradually deepening understanding of their lives and the examples they provide of how major events of the twentieth century affected individual "ordinary" people. Or maybe they were not so ordinary as both were expatriates living in a foreign land which became their own. After the introductory section, more concerned with the author than his protagonists, the stories of the main characters alternate. While dictated by the availability of source material, this process has shortcomings in so far as the strength of the relationship between the two is not clearly demonstrated. While, from his letters when serving overseas, Shanti appears desperately enamoured of Henny, her response and even availability - given the shadowy presence of Hans Mahnert - is clouded in ambiguity. The reasons for the delay in their engagement and marriage are also not satisfactorily explained by Shanti's need to establish himself professionally and buy a property. Yet there was obviously a very strong attachment as demonstrated by Henny's suffering on her deathbed and Shanti's desperation afterwards.

Every time the great Irish writer, William Trevor publishes something new, critics everywhere say it's the greatest thing he's ever written. And it is. Until he writes something else, that is.His aunt & her family were impacted by Holocaust which is one of the most intriguing literary subject

Starred Review. 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. Sometimes I love to sit awhile watching a bird totter around the garden, or listen and follow the water flowing in a stream, or watch the wind blowing through the grasses and heathers when I walk up Kinder Scout - often this is how it feels to me to read this author. Shanti, meanwhile, had joined the Army Dental Corps and, after spells in Egypt and Syria, wound up at Monte Cassino, where his right arm was blown off while he was sitting in a tent. Opportunities for one-armed dentists are limited, but after the war, as an adviser to the Amalgamated Dental Company, Shanti kept up his research. Inspired by an amputee dentist who had suffered a similar fate during the first world war, he began to practise again, with his left hand. The handicap made him concentrate all the harder with his patients, and he soon built up a successful practice. By the end of the 1940s, his life had fallen into a pattern: from nine to five he worked for the Amalgamated in central London, and from six to 10pm he saw patients at home in Hendon. We watch the friendship and love grow between Shanti, who was born in India, and studied dentistry and medicine in Berlin; and Helga, a German Jew. Two very different cultures, and two lives, lives which receded and ebbed within The Holocaust, Auschwitz and Israel, in an ocean of torment, hate, persecution, and, love. From 1908 India, to 1908 Germany, and the years that follow in a Germany ruled by Hitler, we follow the journey of Shanti and Helga, to England, and also the journey of the author, Vikram Seth, into the lives of this childless couple.Did he purposefully intend that both characters should experience life changing events around 1957? The formation, situation and policy of Israel have had profound effects on opinion and action in different parts of what can loosely be called the Islamic world, a fifth of humankind; this has continued for fifty years, and is not likely to cease of its own accord. (345) Vikram Seth is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.

Book Genre: Asian Literature, Autobiography, Biography, Biography Memoir, Cultural, Germany, History, Holocaust, India, Indian Literature, Memoir, Nonfiction, War, World War II Vikram Seth's second non-fiction work, Two Lives, is the story of a century and of a love affair across an ethnic divide. As the name suggests, it is a story of two extraordinary lives, that of his great uncle, Shanti Behari Seth, and of his German Jewish great aunt, Hennerle Gerda Caro. I don’t appreciate my work being analysed to that extent,” he might say. “I just want people to enjoy it." Recounting the two lives gives the author the opportunity to illustrate and reflect on the devastation wrought by the second world war, both, in Shanti's case, through the personal calvary of an Indian fighting for the colonial motherland and being maimed in the process and, in Henny's, through the deportation of her closest relatives and the suffering of those surviving in Berlin after the war. Apart from the author's own interaction with Henny, which gives some indication of her character, the rest of her life is not so clear. One wonders what it was really like being a German Jewish woman in London married to an Indian? There is no discussion of any prejudice towards Henny and Shanti, possibly the result of the paucity of information about the lives of "ordinary" people. As the author actually interviews Shanti for the book and also because he lives longer, his story is more comprehensive, but even here, the struggles are more about overcoming the difficulties of being a dentist with only one arm rather than any other existential problems. This contrasts with the author's mention of the racism suffered by his brother Shantum in Leicester. But one could also interpret this as being true to the times in which the protagonists of the book lived, for them the overwhelming event which affected their lives was the second world war. Two Lives" by Vikram Seth is a non-fiction memoir that explores the themes of family, identity, and the human condition. The book is a personal account of the author's family history, specifically the story of his great-uncle and great-aunt, Shanti and Shanti Behari Seth, who were both born in pre-partition India and lived through the tumultuous times of the British Raj and the partition of India and Pakistan!

BookBrowse Review

While Seth concludes, meditatively, that great drama can be found behind the quiet facades of any suburban house, in fact, his aunt and uncle's lives were both, in different ways, dramatic and unusual. Something extraordinary... A thoughtful, engrossing narrative... This remarkable book offers rich rewards.