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'Two Lives' has passion and panache, but no prose (BOOK REVIEW)
By Uma Nair, Indo-Asian News Service

What happens when history and biography wed memoir? Vikram Seth's "Two Lives" happens. The book tells of an unlikely love in Seth's family and of the horrors of being a Jew in Nazi Germany and the difficulty of being a one-armed dentist.

Seth's grand uncle Shanti Behari Seth, a dentist who lost an arm during the Second World War, and his grand aunt Henny Gerda Caro, a German Jew, spent most of their adult lives in a quiet suburban street in Hendon, Britain where Shanti ran a successful dental practice.

Seth, who stayed with them as a 17-year-old, made efforts to grasp how several events and intellectual currents of the 20th century intersected with the lives of his grand uncle and grand aunt. 

In a television interview Seth said it took him 10 years to write this book.

Shanti's life story begins in Germany in 1933 where he lived with the Caro family, of which Henny was the eldest daughter. Shanti, studying to be a dentist, was referred to as the 'black boy'.

After his studies, as a foreigner in the Third Reich, Shanti was prevented both from practising dentistry and from carrying out postgraduate research and in 1937, much against his will, he moved to Britain.

The world was also closing in on the Caros and Henny lost her job with an insurance company. With help she moved to London.

Shanti, meanwhile, had joined the Army Dental Corps and, after spells in Egypt and Syria, wound up at Monte Cassino, where his right arm was blown off while he was sitting in a tent.

Opportunities for one-armed dentists are limited, but after the war, as an adviser to the Amalgamated Dental Company, Shanti kept up his research.

Inspired by an amputee dentist who had suffered a similar fate during the First World War, he began to practise again, with his left hand. The handicap made him concentrate all the harder on his patients, and he soon built up a successful practice.

Shanti perhaps loved Henny all along but it took him six years to propose, and Henny finally married him in 1951.

While Seth tells us a lot about Shanti, there are few details about Henny. It seems a trunk in the attic fitted the missing pieces of the jigsaw. 

Its contents - mostly letters - gave Seth access to a world she had refused to discuss even with her husband. The journey took him to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, where her mother and sister perished in concentration camps.

It's a familiar story, but less so to Seth than to most Europeans, and Seth's panache at telling it with cold fury, is what catches the reader's fancy.

The book revels in nostalgia as well as familial affection. Seth has split it into sections with the narrative in first person and interviews. But the disappointing part is the third section that, unfortunately, loses the momentum that one credits Seth with.

As an admirer one can't fault Seth because of his limited resources. But the pieces don't quite fit to make a whole narrative that is fluid and lithe. There seems to be too many things happening and one loses sight of the literary intent.

In fact, the weakness lies in the tangential foray that Seth takes into 20th century German history, and you wonder what happened to Henny.

Seth is a writer who has both passion and poise, but this book lacks the prose that he is loved for.

The book reads more like an authorial biography which sadly lacked an editor who should have focused on the memoir more than the history of the Holocaust which is a familiar, everyday memory.

Is the book gripping? Certainly, because Seth is a story teller of sterling quality, and this becomes an apt epitaph for two people who would never have been known if not for a grand nephew who decided to tell the tale albeit in meandering pauses.