Two Lives

Product Information

Concordia Evgenievna Antarova was born in 1886 April 13 in Warsaw. She lost her father when she was eleven years old, so then she was living with her mother. When she was fourteen years old, being in the sixth grade of a secondary school, she also lost her mother, but she continued her studies and finished the school. Having finished the school, she decided to enter a nunnery. She learned a lot while being in it, and the church choir helped to develop her inborn musical talent. However, she was always feeling that the life of the cloister was not for her. She met Saint John of Kronstadt, and he told her that she was fated to work and live among other people. The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse (1986) was his first novel describing the experiences of a group of friends who live in California. A Suitable Boy (1993), an epic of Indian life set in the 1950s, got him the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

There were two books in this collection Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria. I am curious as to whether the author or the publisher decided they should belong together. No one apart from the two parties concerned understands a marriage and what goes on in it and often enough, not even they. I haven't read the book: instead I listened to the six CDs of the audio version, read by Seth himself, with a small cast of excellent actors playing the parts of his relations. Seth's own voice gives a unique depth to his story. Its melodies combine with his precise and restrained language to build a picture that is utterly engrossing.

In 1958 Trevor published his first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, to little critical success. Two years later, he abandoned sculpting completely, feeling his work had become too abstract, and found a job writing copy for a London advertising agency. 'This was absurd,' he said. 'They would give me four lines or so to write and four or five days to write it in. It was so boring. But they had given me this typewriter to work on, so I just started writing stories. I sometimes think all the people who were missing in my sculpture gushed out into the stories.' He published several short stories, then his second and third novels, which both won the Hawthornden Prize (established in 1919 by Alice Warrender and named after William Drummond of Hawthornden, the Hawthornden Prize is one of the UK's oldest literary awards). A number of other prizes followed, and Trevor began working full-time as a writer in 1965.

I need to do a bit of plot here: Mary Louise Dallon marries one Elmer Quarry, for convenience, as they say. Elmer is older, a draper by profession. He lives with his two spinster sisters. Starting from the wedding night, this marriage will not be consummated and Elmer turns rather spectacularly to drink. Mary Louise turns to nostalgic whimsy. She visits her invalid cousin Robert. There are shy protestations of remembered love. The title? Well, Robert reads to her from Turgenev’s novels. My experience with the first, Reading Turgenev, was exactly as I described above and how I associate my best times with this (usually reliable for me) author and I would rate that one a 4.5! Two Lives is a biographical work of Seth spanning the lives of a couple-- Shanti and Henny. Shanti is Vikram's uncle, and Henny is a Jew hailing from Berlin. This book manages to cover the mundane and articulately touches upon the last centuries excesses on normal people. Seth captures the essence of characters very well while giving us insights into their social circle pre and post-war era through their intimate letters. The letters sometimes drag while reading, but after getting through it, one feels fulfilled. The book is exceedingly detailed, which is quintessential Seth. While it does bog down the reader, but it manages not to be boring. This book also led me to paths unexplored about Judaism, Holocaust, the role of religion, genocides; particularly interviews of genocide survivors. 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)

BookBrowse Review

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. 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.