Whenever I finish reading a book, its “feel” lingers on for some time. Every book has its own feel, its own distinct character that makes one decide how one liked the book. Two Lives has left me feeling content.
I write this review after a few hours of reading the last page. It gave me time to sink in the whole narrative and piece my scattered perceptions of the book over the past many days together. Vikram Seth has once again emerged as this amazing narrator who weaves images in his words with such finesse that is simple unique.
The book is an honest effort of telling the story of his uncle Shanti and Aunty Henny. Their respective worlds were so disparate and yet how they come together and make a world of their own forms the fabric of the tale. Their bland love strikes as special in its banality. Their extraordinary lives strike as simple for the admirable figures they were. What I liked most about the book was its sheer candor. After taking the reader on a ride of interest, joy, anger, war, fear, love, friendship, family ties, and the whole gamut of human emotions, Seth brings the reader back to reality; back to the present. He reminisces the past and sums it all up beautifully in the end. One can almost feel what he felt on penning down the story of those two people who he so dearly loved and who loved him so dearly. One can sense what a personal thing it is for him, yet he wants to tell their story. He wants to share it with the world.
Here are my fav lines from the final chapter that I think are worth mentioning here:
“Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village on this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found. The strange journeys we undertake on our earthly pilgrimage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that cleave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable.”
Definitely worth a read for genuine lovers of literature. And those who rather read fiction: Go grab your copy of An Equal Music!
