Two Lives

With just two pages to go before I finished Two Lives, I remembered Vikram Seth is also a poet. A quick scan through the pages after I was done revealed that though this is no The Golden Gate, his novel in verse, the prose is nothing if not rhythmic. Almost as if Seth sung out his lines as he wrote them. (I actually think such writing would be instinctive for him). Here's a simple example I've picked out,

"A patient rang the doorbell; he was in acute distress. Henny told him that Shanti was too ill to help him. But when Shanti came out of his room and recognised the man, he told Henny that he could not go into hospital without treating him."

Of course, one might think there's not much to that sentence, but I'm pretty much convinced that rhythm matters deeply to Seth. Perhaps it is because the only other book I've read of his is An Equal Music. In Two Lives, Seth also reveals something of the way he approached this book,

In a double biography, an intertwined meditation, where the author is anomalous third briad, sometimes visible, sometimes not, there are intriguing possibilities of structure. For one thing, in what order should one recount events? ...Though I now know where to end this book, I did not at first know where to begin it...

It's a reminder that even celebrated writers are mortal (and therefore like me!), and that matters of form, structure and substance need to be worked on even by them, much like a random post in any blog! Two Lives also answers partly, the quesiton of what happened to the Jews who survived Hitler and what life was like for those who stayed on in Berlin after it was bombed out in the closing days of World War II. Indeed, this review quotes a line that may tell you more about the man who shaped the 20th century,

Shanti left Germany in 1936, though not before coming across Hitler in a Berlin park, surrounded by SS men. "He had a bridge in his mouth and he was made up with lipstick and all," he told the author. "I thought he might be a homo - but later on I found out they were going to film him in color."