Two Lives
A Memoir
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Two Lives
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Narrated by:
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Vikram Seth
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By:
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Vikram Seth
About this listen
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.
Helga Gerda Caro, known to everyone as "Henny" was also born in 1908, in Berlin, to a Jewish family, cultured, patriotic, and intensely German. When the family decided to take Shanti as a lodger, Henny's first reaction was, "Don't take the black man!" But a friendship flowered, and when Henny fled Hitler's Germany for England just one month before war broke out, she was met at Victoria Station by the only person in the country she knew: Shanti.
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.
Two Lives is both a history of a violent century seen through the eyes of two survivors and an intimate portrait of their friendship, marriage, and abiding yet complex love. Part biography, part memoir, part meditation on our times, this is the true tale of two remarkable lives, a masterful telling from one of our greatest living writers.
©2005 Vikram Seth (P)2005 TimeWarnerUKListeners also enjoyed...
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 11,066
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 10,088
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- Narrated by: Abraham Verghese
- Length: 31 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 9,893
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 8,654
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 8,642
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time.
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- By Regina on 05-06-23
By: Abraham Verghese
-
One Hundred Years of Solitude
- By: Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 6,447
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 5,648
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Story4 out of 5 stars 5,651
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
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What in the heck happened?????
- By Melinda on 02-05-14
By: Gabriel García Márquez, and others
-
Translating Myself and Others
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 17
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 16
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 16
Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages. With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid's myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle's Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom.
-
5 out of 5 stars
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Not just for translators
- By Mariano Desmaras on 07-06-23
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
The Passenger
- A Novel
- By: Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, André Aciman
- Narrated by: Philip Boehm, Neil Hellegers
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 194
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 163
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 163
Berlin, November 1938. Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As storm troopers pound on his door, Otto Silbermann, a respected businessman who fought for Germany in the Great War, is forced to sneak out the back of his own home. Turned away from establishments he had long patronized, and fearful of being exposed as a Jew despite his Aryan looks, he boards a train.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Top-notch novel
- By R. Klein on 05-31-21
By: Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, and others
Critic reviews
- National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee, Autobiography, 2005
"This lovely book...examines great and fearful events seen through extraordinary lives....Clear and elegant....A most unusual, worthwhile book." (Publishers Weekly)
What listeners say about Two Lives
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- Janis
- 01-17-07
Excellent!
I really enjoyed this book - it gives a perspective on the writer, Vikram Seth, and is a compelling story about the lives of 2 very different people, brought together by a war. The format is the letters of Shanti and Henny to each other, and their friends. It gives a very realistic view of what life was like during and after the war as well, which was very unsettling - to see the effects on ordinary people. If you like memoirs, you should like this book. The reading is also done very well, with 3 different readers contributing.
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8 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Teodoro
- 01-26-22
Timely or timeless?
This story hit me at a time when the world news could be seen with a different lens...
When the student is ready the teacher will appear.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- Vivek
- 11-09-05
A slow start but keeps getting better
I bought this book on an impluse. I had read his "Suitable Boy" and jumped at a chance to read his latest book. I think he is a fine author. I must say I did not enjoy this book as much as I had liked "Suitable Boy" but then I think a comparison between those two books is unfair. This book is more personal and therefore more 'real'. The narration by Vikram Seth is very engaging. I think this book would be enjoyed by all those who have read Vikram Seth before. This book gives you an insight into the author himself. Its almost like having a chance to meet the author in person and getting to know him.
If you like fiction, if you have read Vikram Seth before, I am sure you will enjoy this book.
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21 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 08-12-20
Exceptional and timely
I cannot recommend this book enough. Mr. Seth does such a beautiful tribute to his own work—an excellent performance of the work. The themes and the narrative string were so perfect, perfectly written. I am so grateful this story exists and that Mr. Seth wrote it.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Susan Alberts
- 01-10-20
A lyrical memoir
This was a beautiful, lyrical memoir about the author's beloved uncle and aunt, who came from very different countries and backgrounds (India and Germany, respectively) and who both survived WWII. Their experiences were very different and yet uniting. I recommend this book for people who like thoughtful, lyrical writing and are curious about the lives and experiences of others, both joyful and tragic.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
- JB Richardson
- 03-29-08
Two Lives
A lovely and thoughtful book. It has a close-up, personal view of WW2 comparable to that in Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
- Mary
- 10-17-06
Boring
Dull story, disjointed and dry. Very disappointed that I wasted a credit on this book.
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2 people found this helpful