Extra-ordinary
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This book shows how extraordinary two 'ordinary' people can be. Even if it doesn't set out to, it highlights the vacuousness of being famous just for being famous. These two lives were the opposite: not famous, but fascinating, real and well lived. They have so much to tell about being human, India, World War Two, suburban Britain, suffering, hope, love and the interdependence of situations, times and places. How many people, like Shanti and Henny, have life stories just waiting to be told, but they don't tell because it's just their life; it's their business. Who would be interested, perhaps they think...
Of course, it helps here that their stories are told by a great writer who loved them both and knew them so well. But should the stories have been told? Should Vikram Seth have revealed so much about two people, now deceased, including private correspondence? That's a hard one to answer but, as a reader, I'm pleased he did.
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I enjoyed this more than A Suitable Boy!
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And I very much enjoyed A Suitable Boy!
This was a very moving and engrossing account of the lives of Seth's great uncle and aunt in pre-war Berlin, during the war and then in suburban London.
Seth entwined the different parts of their stories in a very readable way.
This is one of the best books I have read this year and I will be thinking about it for a long time to come.
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Enduring Love
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A very moving memoir about the author's great-uncle Shanti and great-aunt Henny. He became very close to them after they welcomed him into their home, when as a seventeen year old he arrived in England to complete his education.
Through the detailed story of these `Two Lives' we learn personal details about how some of the great events of the 20C had an effect on Shanti and Henny.
Vikram Seth decided to write this story of his Uncle's enduring love for Henny, unfortunately after she had died. A chance finding of letters and photographs kept from her past enabled him to find out enough of her side of the story along with many interviews with Shanti in his latter years.
It is long at over 500 pages but I found I read it much quicker than I expected to as I was drawn into the lives of Shanti and Henny.
The details in this sensitively written biography will stay with you for a long time after reading.
I think the poem that the author dedicates to his uncle and aunt at the beginning of the book actually says it all beautifully so I am taking the liberty of reproducing it here.
TO SHANTI UNCLE AND AUNTY HENNY
Some words of yours to me suggested
How, through the fog of peace and war,
A pulse beat on, that, strained and tested,
No loss could mute, nor sorrow mar.
To trace this pulse through its confusions,
Illusions, allusions, elusions,
And limn its complex graph of love,
No skein of words is fine enough.
Does this half-filial endeavour
Hold half a chance of half-success -
Even to track your lives, much less
Not to let these recede for ever?
No, if I'd hoped to grasp the whole;
Yes, if some shard may touch the soul.
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Elegy for a tormented century
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A one-armed dentist and his company secretary wife who quarrel noisily in German without embarrassment in front of uncomprehending English-speaking guests - they do not seem an absorbing subject for a 500-page book, but Vikram Seth takes us under the seemingly ordinary surface to explore the mystery of enduring love and of what it is to be human. Told in beautiful prose, with a poet's eye for telling detail and with deep psychological insight, this double biography is at the same time an elegy for the Twentieth Century. It will make you laugh, it may make you cry, but you will find it hard to put down before you reach the twist in the tail.
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Seth's secret revealed
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At last, the enigma of Vikram Seth is uncovered. We now understand why his books are intelectually underpowered and don't actually go anywhere. Seth admires people in his own family who have gone their own way- created their own destiny- and this is what he himself has done. By turning his back on the world of ideas and political engagement, he has created his own market, his own readership- and that readership is good hearted, sentimental, deeply ignorant (where is Germany? Well, it's a country in Europe and it was ruled by this really nasty guy called Hitler etc.)and needs desparately to be protected from thought.
Now there was a time, when it seemed plausible to suggest that perhaps the world would have been a better place if there had never been such a thing as political engagement or Social critique. Maybe, if everyone just got on with their own jobs- were content not to question their own station in life- then everything would be just peachy! But is that really the case? After 9/11? After Iraq? Surely, the point about the 'Two lives' is that without political engagement, without Social critique, we too will sleepwalk towards disaster as the World sleepwalked towards disaster in the '30's.
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