ISBN: 0060599669
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Summary: A book of quiet virtues
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?
Summary: Intimate in detail, vast in scope
This tale traverses through the world
Wars, from Biswan to Brandenburg Gate.
On a nearby sofa, I lie curled
Listening to a soft and subdued Seth.
In letters that charm and endear,
Very slowly, the people appear.
Each fragment adds up to the whole;
Somehow, together they touch the soul.
Summary: 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 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.
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