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Two Lives
by Vikram Seth
The author ("A Suitable Boy") combines a memoir of his own formative years with a biography of his aunt and uncle, who helped raise him in London as a teenager after his departure from Calcutta.
HarperCollins, 512 pages
11/01/2005
$27.95
ISBN: 0060599669
Nonfiction
Biographies & Memoirs
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Kirkus Reviews
Another triumph for one of the most versatile and engaging of all contemporary writers. [1 Oct 2005, p. 1069]
Library Journal Mark Alan Williams
His writing is engaging and his characters fully developed and quickly familiar. [15 Nov 2005, p. 75]
Publishers Weekly
A most unusual, worthwhile book. [22 Aug 2005, p. 45]
The Economist
[Seth] acknowledges the difficulties that face the historian, but is cautious in his use of conjecture, deploying it always with a grace and lightness that gently prise meaning from otherwise incomplete and unyielding evidence. It is this ability and willingness to act as a vehicle for events both personal and historic that make this such a wonderful book.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Seth's 503-page doorstopper isn't for everyone. But readers who get a thrill out of seeing a thoughtful, engrossing narrative teased out of seemingly ordinary lives will find this remarkable book offers rich rewards.
San Francisco Chronicle Sandip Roy
In the context of an evil century, this odd couple, the Holocaust survivor and the one-armed dentist, could have no better epitaph.
The New York Times William Grimes
"Two Lives" is a curious tale curiously told. Mr. Seth, with ferocious diligence, leaves no stone unturned in his efforts to recreate the childhood and early adulthood of his two protagonists.
The Spectator Philip Hensher
It's a generous and a forgiving book. But by the end we see the decent limits of forgiveness.
Christian Science Monitor Marjorie Kehe
"Two Lives" is very much like a long series of rambling family visits, and some readers may long for tighter editing. But in truth Seth's repetition and excursions away from his central point are almost always skilled. They build up layers which help us to know his characters ever more intimately.
Booklist Brad Hooper
As well as offering an insightful exploration of... broad themes, this beautiful book delivers a passionate answer to a more personal but timeless question of human relations: How do two people ever manage to end up together? [1 Sep 2005, p. 5]
Daily Telegraph Hilary Mantel
The book's strength... lies in its depiction of the particular and the personal. There is nothing either raw or particularly controversial in his analysis, but the present day is not kind to historical overviews. As soon as you've patted your generalities into place, some malcontent with a rucksack comes and blows them sky-high.
Daily Telegraph Nicholas Shakespeare
There are passages where the author's Sebaldian playful earnestness dissolves into something more tensionless and dutiful; when he is overly respectful of letters from which he quotes too fully; when his insecurity about where to go with his material means that he tries to take it everywhere and his wide angle becomes so wide that the central characters get lost.
Los Angeles Times Heller McAlpin
"Two Lives" is an intricate study of the way lives and worlds can
intertwine. [6 Nov 2005]
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Janice Kulyk Keefer
It is no disservice to Seth to find his double biography and memoir a sufficiently good--and eminently suitable--tribute to and exploration of the complex, exemplary lives of two people whom it behooves us all to know. [8 Oct 2005]
The Guardian Frances Wilson
Seth's writing deals with the epic. His ambition in Two Lives is to encompass the major events of the 20th century in an account of two unhistoric lives. Seth gives us the horrors of the period through a tidy house in Hendon.
The New Yorker
The book is less dazzling than its predecessors, but this seems deliberate, as if Seth had adopted the mantle of dutiful family archivist a little too successfully. Nonetheless, his quiet tone has cumulative power as it leads us back in time from suburban calm to the death chambers of Birkenau.
New York Review Of Books Anita Desai
[Seth's] book helps to fill an absence, remarked on in a recent article in the Guardian by William Dalrymple, of biography and literary nonfiction in the English-language literature of India.
Boston Globe Laila Lalami
"Two Lives" delivers an incomplete portrait of a fascinating couple.
The Independent James Urquhart
Two Lives gives us the author's aunt and uncle with some degree of intimacy, but surprisingly little greater understanding of the turbulence through which they lived.
Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
Probably Holocaust stories will never--should never--lose their power to shock and move us, but this one would have been told better if it had been told more briefly.
The New York Times Book Review Pankaj Mishra
Seth's eye for social detail is often sharp, but his book would have been stronger if it had conveyed a more vivid sense of prewar London and Berlin.
Wall Street Journal Tunku Varadarajan
Mr. Seth offers here a great and moving tale only to thwart its proper telling by an inability to edit himself and by a failure to keep his sentimentality in check.
 The average user rating for this book is 9.4 (out of 10) based on 5 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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