two books, one writer

While I was on holiday I read two books by Vikram Seth.

Seth shot to writerly prominence with A Suitable Boy, an enormous book which I have not read, mainly because it is so enormous. Though I do recall a friend saying that its length was a wonderful feature - she never wanted it to end and relished her bedtime readings of a chapter a night, always (except at the end, of course) with many more chapters to look forward to.

I'm still not sure if I could manage such a read, but I've been totally won over to Vikram Seth's writing, having now ingested his last two books - a novel, An Equal Music, from 1999, and Two Lives, his latest, a biography, I suppose you'd call it, of his aunt and uncle.

Not just any old aunt and uncle. His great-uncle Shanti was of course Indian, but went to Berlin in the 1930s to study dentistry, arriving knowing not a word of German. He ended up boarding with a Jewish family and one of the daughters, Henny, was years later to become his wife, Vikram's aunt. Shanti and Henny seperately left for London before the war and spent the rest of their lives there. Henny's mother and sister were killed in Nazi concentration camps. During the war Shanti was a British army dentist who lost his right arm to a German shell in Italy. He still managed to return to an active career in dentistry.

A large part of the book is based on the correspondence between Henny and her friends in Berlin in the immediate postwar years - letters which try to assess who stood by the Berlin Jews when they were under such duress; who were the truly 'good' people and who essentially went along with the Nazis. I found these letters fascinating.

I didn't much care for either Shanti or Henny, but that didn't matter - and it was even something else to consider in a book which gave me so much to think about, about how people relate to one another, about language, home and marriage. Vikram doesn't present an idealised picture of them (although his description of the young Henny as "enchantingly beautiful" left me shaking my head) and he doesn't shy away from exploration of Henny's sexual ambiguity. He uncovers layer upon layer of their lives, as seen by all sorts of people, including his own brother, who was an Anti-Nazi League activist in the 1970s yet never discussed with his aunt and uncle what they'd gone through with the 'real' Nazis a mere 30 years earlier.

No matter how much I read or watch about the 1930s and 1940s, especially the Holocaust (I watched most of the recent BBC documentary series about it), I still find it hard to take in or imagine what daily life was like. I'd now like to read more about Berlin during the war - most Jews were not 'deported' (to their deaths) from there until 1943. It's hard to envisage what their lives were like during the war. But Two Lives fills in some gaps.

Despite having learned piano for several years, I know very little about classical music. While I was reading An Equal Music, with all its talk of composers and compositions which meant little to me, I wondered how much I was missing. (And in the course of wiritng this I discovered that there is a CD of associated music.) In the end, I didn't care. Didn't care because the story was wonderful. Seth's writing did get a bit histrionic in parts, but how nice to read a desperate love story written by a man. And I histrionically burst into tears in one scene (the one where he reads the letter about the violin and the will, for those who've read it). This was a first for me - sure I've shed tears over books before, but bursting into, never. This indicates both something about my current emotional state and how involving I found this story. It was also nice to read a book where every character, even and perhaps especially, the hero, had annoying character traits, as do we all in real life. Seth seems to have a good and compassionate eye for human flaws - maybe it is an Indian eye.

[Thank goodness I at one stage saved this as a draft, as when I went to publish it, Typepad 'had a problem' and lost it. So you are getting the truncated earlier version. I can't tell you how demoralised this makes me feel.]

Comments

[Jody]

That lost post thing has happened to me a few times, and I almost always have to turn away from the computer for a day, it feels so awful. And yet I still remember too rarely to save the drafts....

I've never read any Seth, I'll have to seek his books out now.

[David]

I've read An Equal Music and had pretty similar thoughts to yours. It's quite a feat to make the intricacies of a musical life so fascinating, even to those who know nothing of the subject. And A Suitable Boy was also my daily soap for a couple of months. Once you get into the groove, you truly don't want it to end.

[webfrau]

Interesting. I read An Equal Music on the recommendation of an ensemble of musical friends a few years back. I was disappointed in it, it didn't rate as well with me as the publicity they gave it suggested. I found it interesting from my point of view as a member of an ensemble and I do remember being incredibly irritated by some of the characters. I found myself curiously indifferent to the book.

[Din]

Oddly enough I bought the CD years ago on the strength of one track - a string version of one of Bach's Contrapunctus (or should that be Contrapuncti). Heard it on the radio and thought it sublime. The rest of the album is good - you'd probably find you recognised most of the music once you heard it. Must read the book know.