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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Nov 2005, 512 pages
Paperback:
Jun 2006, 544 pages
A heartrending new book - the story of a marriage and the story of two lives - from the author of the international bestselling novel A Suitable Boy.
A heartrending new book -- the story of a marriage and
the story of two lives -- from the author of the international bestselling
novel A Suitable Boy
Shanti Behari Seth was born on the eighth day of the eighth month in the
eighth year of the twentieth century; he died two years before its close. He
was brought up in India in the apparently vigorous but dying Raj and was
sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin -- though he could not speak a
word of German -- to study medicine and dentistry. It was here, before he
migrated to Britain, that Shanti's path first crossed that of his future
wife.
Helga Gerda Caro, known to everyone as "Henny" was also born in 1908, in
Berlin, to a Jewish family -- cultured, patriotic, and intensely German.
When the family decided to take Shanti as a lodger, Henny's first reaction
was, "Don't take the black man!" But a friendship flowered, and when Henny
fled Hitler's Germany for England just one month before war broke out, she
was met at Victoria Station by the only person in the country she knew:
Shanti.
Vikram Seth has woven together their astonishing story, which recounts
the arrival into this childless couple's lives of their great-nephew from
India -- the teenage student Vikram Seth. The result 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.
Two Lives is both a history of a violent century seen through the
eyes of two survivors and an intimate portrait of their friendship,
marriage, and abiding yet complex love. Part biography, part memoir, part
meditation on our times, this is the true tale of two remarkable lives -- a
masterful telling from one of our greatest living writers.
1.1
When I was seventeen I went to live with my great-uncle and
great-aunt
in England. He was Indian by origin, she German. They were
both sixty. I hardly knew them at the time.
It was August 1969 – the monsoon season in Calcutta. A few
days before I left, Mama had taken me to a temple to be blessed,
which was most unlike her. She and Papa came to see me off at
Dumdum Airport. I arrived at Heathrow in the afternoon. My
great-uncle and great-aunt were still away on their annual
holiday
in Switzerland and, as I recall, I was met at the terminal by
someone
in the firm for which my father worked. My first impression
was of the width of the road that led (under grey skies) to
London.
I was housed for a night in a drab hotel somewhere near Green
Park.
That evening Shanti Uncle and Aunty Henny returned from
Switzerland, and the following day I and my luggage arrived at
their door.
I looked at the house that was to be my home for the next few
years. There...
Simon Winchester
I cannot remember ever being quite so moved by a memoir... [Seth's] achievement has exceeded all possible expectations.Vikram Seth was born in India and educated there and in
England, California, and China. He has written acclaimed books in several
genres: verse novel, The Golden Gate; travel book, From Heaven
Lake; animal fables, Beastly Tales; epic novel, A Suitable Boy,
and a couple of books for children.
Partial bibliography:
Novels
The Golden Gate (1986)
A Suitable Boy (1993)
An Equal Music (1999)
Poetry
Mappings (1981)
Humble Administrator's Garden (1985)
All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990)
Beastly Tales (1991)
Three Chinese Poets (1992)
Non-Fiction
From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang And Tibet (1983)
Two Lives (2005)
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