Two Lives

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Two Lives' is an amazing book. It takes you into different worlds and lives. It is a story of author' Uncle Shanti who came to Germany from India to study dentistry, not knowing that he would live his entire life abroad. His whole journey was extraordinary. However, the author was least aware of the significant aspects of his uncle's history till his parents showed him letters that uncle Shanti wrote to his German wife, Henny. Even as a young boy, the author knew his uncle and aunt, and in fact had stayed with them in his teens. Consequently, the rest of his life he remained close to them, he was particularly fond of his aunt, Henny. Since the couple did not have a child of their own, they also grew attached to Vikram. While Vikram knew them as his uncle and aunt, he did not know about their past and what they went through in their early lives. The first time his parent showed him uncle Shanti's letters after his death, the writer in Vikram found enough material for a book. There was much in these letters that made him write about these two extraordinary lives. The implicit collusion of Stein and Toklas with Bernard Fay - who at the time was busily compiling lists of Freemasons for the Nazis to arrest - was troubling in the extreme. What they did to obtain and hold onto their beautiful country house may have been immoral, at the very least it was achieved with the protection of Fay and his like. Two Lives contains two novellas by William Trevor. I have elected to review and rate them separately.

His poetry includes The Humble Administrator's Garden (1985) and All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990). His Beastly Tales from Here and There (1992) is children's book consisting of ten stories in verse about animals.

What is the significance of them both being deeply attached to fictional worlds, and memorial gardens, even if in different ways? 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. As in READING TURGENEV, MY HOUSE IN UMBRIA explores what it means to be human. The answer is often bleak (Trevor said that he, himself was a pessimist), but in both novellas, the writing is suffused with such beauty that the bleakness becomes transcendent.

Finally, the oceanic tremor of a book and harbinger of the Gertrude Stein tidal wave, Janet Malcolm's Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007). Barbara Will's penetrating study Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma delineates the deep biographical and artistic connections between Stein and fascism.A coming of age story following the life and adventures of Andrew McLeod. This is the story of how a nerd gamed the system and had an amazing life. Emily herds them into that house in Umbria. The survivors heal together, ‘a skin’ forming over them. Concordia Antarova was living two lives of equal value: a creative life of an opera singer and an inner spiritual one… Everyone who knew C. E. Antarova-singer knew almost nothing about her spiritual path, and on the contrary, those who were naming her as their spiritual leader didn’t pay lots of their attention to her theatrical creative activities. Her work “Two Lives” is dedicated namely to those disciples of hers who were close to her in spirit. After her death in 1959 her closest disciples were left with four handwritten copies of the novel. Two Lives” couldn’t be a more befitting title for this book, for it consists of two stories narrated by middle-aged women who review past events to make sense of their dismal present. Such title could also be interpreted as the alternative existences both protagonists create in their minds to cope with the unsparing reality that has robbed them of their youthful illusions. Nor has Elder been abused enough to write a compelling memoir of survival. Elder and his brothers were spanked with belts and switches, not electrical cords or rods--and only to discipline them, not out of parental cruelty. When the kids cry as they are disciplined, the father declares: "I'll give you a reason to cry!" This was, unbelievably, a common saying amongst the Greatest Generation as they raised their kids, and is not uniquely something that happened to Larry Elder. (My grandmother used it on my mother.) The senior Elder was prone to comical fits of outrage. However, a moment of levity comes from his pronouncement that Nixon should just make more tapes as a solution for Watergate.

In 2005, he published Two Lives, a family memoir written at the suggestion of his mother, which focuses on the lives of his great-uncle (Shanti Behari Seth) and German-Jewish great aunt (Henny Caro) who met in Berlin in the early 1930s while Shanti was a student there and with whom Seth stayed extensively on going to England at age 17 for school. As with From Heaven Lake, Two Lives contains much autobiography. What is the significance of them both being 56 years old at that time and both arriving at defining moments in their exterior as well as interior lives? This is not the book I had understood it to be, which is my fault. This is purely an academic work, and if you're not familiar with Stein's writing, then you will be at a loss. I also have to say I don't really care much for the style of the author of this book. It's more about name dropping. There's focus on her subjects in there, but she's much more interested in the historiography of the subjects than her subjects themselves. Vikram Seth has woven together their astonishing story, which recounts the arrival into this childless couple's lives of their great-nephew from India -- the teenage student Vikram Seth. The result is an extraordinary tapestry of India, the Third Reich and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, postwar Germany and 1970s Britain. She decided to go to St. Petersburg where she entered the faculty of history and philology and graduated it in 1904. She was offered a job in the department of philology, but her dream was singing and theatre. She decided to devote her life to the art. The lessons of singing were expensive, so she had to work hard.Shanti Behari Seth was born on the eighth day of the eighth month in the eighth year of the twentieth century; he died two years before its close. He was brought up in India in the apparently vigorous but dying Raj and was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin -- though he could not speak a word of German -- to study medicine and dentistry. It was here, before he migrated to Britain, that Shanti's path first crossed that of his future wife. William Trevor is meticulous in every tiny detail, psychologically very profound and to him human lives are open books… 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. It takes a long time to read The Making of Americans. The language Stein writes in (after cutting herself loose from the conventional language of the opening Dehning section) is not the transparent language through which we enter stories, forgetting we are reading. We never forget we are reading while reading The Making of Americans. Stein seems to be transcribing rather than