Two Lives

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Book 20 – threesomes, practice makes perfect. Another summer job ends up with the usual chaos. (June to September 1986). 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. Vikram Seth is brilliant with his use of word visuals and descriptives.”>Two Lives” is a must read for everyone who is interested in World War II, The Holocaust, India, England, multi-cultural relationships, and a love that crosses all the cultural boundaries. Once I started reading it, I could not put it down. Ron Rash is renowned for his writing about Appalachia, but his latest book, The Caretaker, begins ... 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.

He spent a lot of time with them and found some letters and content on their lives so though of documenting themFrom the author of A Suitable Boy, one of my all-time favorite books, comes the story of his great-uncle and -aunt, two ordinary people living in extraordinary times. Shanti, his uncle, left India as a young man to study dentistry in Germany in the early 30's, and it was there that he met the Jewish woman who would eventually become his wife.

The most heart-wrenching part of the book for me was the part containing Henny's correspondance with her German friends after the war trying to learn what had happened to her Mother and sister. It is an up-close and personal look at the sorrow and suffering repeated millions to times over during the holocaust. And, in addition to the anguish of learning about the fate of her family, Henny had to deal with her ambivalent feelings toward her non-Jewish friends. She even received a letter from her former German boyfriend, who had played the part of a good Nazi during the war, hinting at an interest in a continuing relationship. She also learns that her brother was able to flee to South American prior to the war but had squandered money that could have been used to get her mother and sister out of Germany. She was particularly disturbed to learn that the husband of one of her closest friends may have been a member of the Nazi SA. He admired these two people and very close to them. So when they died he wanted to write a tribute to them Told in the first-person narrative, the reader is dragged away in a deluge of unreliable memories that blends with the accounts of the grim lives these women recite in muffled resignation, as if they tried to convince themselves that the traumatic experiences they went through didn’t actually befall on them. Book 16 – photography and modelling and yet more complications with his 'simple' summer job. (April to July 1985). 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.How Trevor has managed to immerse himself under the skins of two women in such a skilful way I find remarkable and in fact baffling. He shows a sensitivity and a style of writing that is quite mesmerising. I still don't know why I love this book so much. In fact I'm just starting his novel "The Silence in the Garden". 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.

William Trevor is meticulous in every tiny detail, psychologically very profound and to him human lives are open books… Book 23 – the strain is starting to tell. Will Andrew screw up this close to graduation? (Winter of 1987). The stories that William Trevor traces in Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria follow the lives of two very different women into a realm where the lines between memory, imagination, and reality are blurred; their inner worlds colliding with the outer through defining moments of rupture. It is easy to see why these two novels belong together, for the two lives they speak of seem to unfold in ways that assume a significance greater than just their individual stories. Her letter consists of two long, tumbling, chatty paragraphs cramming the writing-paper to the full; new sentences spring into existence before the previous ones are closed. She writes in the old German script, slanting strongly to the right. Her a’s and o’s are often left open to the elements, and she never crosses her t’s. (318) In England the only person Henny knew who shared any memories of her family and former life was Shanti. Shanti's life on the other hand was dramatically changed by the loss of his arm. So they found comfort in each other’s company. They eventually got married, but the slow deliberate pace of their courtship indicates little romantic passion.This novel will help everyone to reflect on his own place in today’s complicated life and his relations to it. Great examples in this book reveal how people are boiling in their own passions, how they are enslaved by them. Later the paths for the reader are revealed along which the Teachers of Life are leading people from their passions to liberation, from weakness to fortitude, from fortitude to power, from power to beauty… Shanti first leaves India as a young man. He wants to study in Europe to widen his opportunities. His family insists he studies medicine or dentistry. He plans to study dentistry and settles on studying in 1930s Germany—although he must also learn Latin to become a certified dentist there. He’s accepted into a dental school based in Berlin, but first, he needs to find somewhere to stay. After trying a few lodgings, Henny’s mother takes him in. For a while he took a room in the house of a physiotherapist, whose husband, when Shanti had a bad stomach ache and couldn’t afford to send for a doctor, suggested he place their large tabby cat on his stomach; this worked remarkably well. (79) Henny, initially, doesn’t want him staying with them because he’s not German. However, she’s soon charmed by his warm and friendly manner, his kindness, and his humor. Henny is engaged to Hans, a young German, and so she’s not looking for a relationship. Still, she enjoys Shanti’s company. Even if she had wanted Shanti for a partner, the rise of Hitler puts an end to any hopes of romance. If you are looking for a more traditional telling of a tale, you may find this book confusing, at least at first. This is more of the author telling the story of how he came to tell this story, while telling the story. I came to the end deciding his method works and actually, the change was refreshing.

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. 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. "Some there be," runs a passage in Ecclesiasticus, "which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been." Henny and Shanti had no children. But they did have an author for a great-nephew. And his Two Lives is a stay against their oblivion. So - after the simple-minded cruelty of the Quarry sisters I don't have the umph to pursue the second story in this book. In the first one, Reading Turgenev there is a description of Robert which my gut feeling tells me is Trevor himself - the bookish, delicate boy who is different from the run-of-the-mill lads found in small-town Ireland. I suspect the origins of the story come from Trevor's own experiences of being bullied and ostracised. We can find lots of information about these Teachers in the works by Helena and Nicholas Roerich in which their cooperation with the Great Teachers is also reflected. The same Teachers were the guardians of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – the author of “The Secret Doctrine” and founder of the Theosophical Society in 19th century.But, we must remember, this is a memoir, a factual story of lives, and all the details need to be relayed and interwoven into the family fabric, the family quilt of their lifespans. This is not a novel, or fictionalized account, but, rather an actual documentation of their lives. Love may either make one happy or bring the bitter unhappiness: the heroine’s marriage turns into an excruciating disaster so she tries to hide in her dreamworld but a dreamworld is so brittle… Trevor draws these characters with predictable subtle perfection. There is much to like here. Perhaps, though, I read Turgenev too long ago. The quoted passages failed to provoke an Ah-Ha! moment.