Two Lives
(Vikram Seth)
There's no reason to get over Love in the Time of Cholera, a favourite rainy day bedside, when you can slip cozily into the world of Shanti and Henny in Vikram Seth's Two Lives. While Marquez has Fermina and Florentino live apart and love endlessly, Seth's tale of his great uncle and aunt's marriage spanning more than four decades speaks of a love, passionate and understated at the same time. Seth gets his story from interviewing his 90 year old uncle and sifting through his Aunt Henny's letters written at the time of their courtship. Henny battles with memories of the Holocaust while Shanti tries to forget about the arm he lost in a war. Shanti and Henny meet as strangers,but learn eventually to live like tolerant spouses; he working as a full time dentist in London and Henny being his dutiful half. Seth writes simply about the couple who captured his imagination from the time he went over to stay with them in London where he went to study. There's something more that the book brings out. There is this little person in all of us who while panicking about a study loan feels one with an underprivileged orphan in the world. The author's only connection besides his History books, with the Holocaust was his aunt Henny. Yet he feels sincere rage when he reads, and tells us about a detailed document about how many people would be gassed on a certain day in a camp. And he wants to make one fall in love. One cries with Henny when she mourns the loss of her young sister Lola in a concentration camp. One wants to tell Shanti to keep trying to woo his darling Hennerele . One wants to meet the Seths and borrow their love story. Repeatedly.
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