Two Lives

Product Information

Exactly how DID two rather prominent Jewish lesbians manage to lead a rather idyllic French country life in the middle of the Nazi occupation of France? This is the question Malcolm starts with in her attempt to get a foothold in the much-chronicled, much more hinted and insinuated life of Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B Toklas. As reflected in the book's subtitle ― "Two Lives ... Eight Hours" ― one extraordinary, all- day conversation between Elder and his long- estranged father utterly transformed their relationship. It is no exaggeration to say the book will likewise transform readers. As a foreigner in the Third Reich, Shanti was prevented both from practising dentistry and from carrying out postgraduate research, and in 1937, much against his will, he moved to Britain. The world was also closing in on the Caros, who were Jewish: many of their non-Jewish friends drifted away, too afraid to visit them, and Henny lost her job with an insurance company. Thanks to Hans's father, she got out a month before the war, to stay with a family called Arberry in London. Her mother and sister Lola were less fortunate. I love Alice and Gertrude, and have a high tolerance for reading all about them from many different angles. That said, I found I liked this book less and less the more I read and the more I read the more I wondered who are you I wondered to talk like this. Book Genre: Asian Literature, Autobiography, Biography, Biography Memoir, Cultural, Germany, History, Holocaust, India, Indian Literature, Memoir, Nonfiction, War, World War II

Love may either make one happy or bring the bitter unhappiness: the heroine’s marriage turns into an excruciating disaster so she tries to hide in her dreamworld but a dreamworld is so brittle… A lot of people have been puzzled by the connection between these two novellas. They both have as their pivot a woman of the same age who lives in a fantasy world. My theory is the second novella was written out of the missed opportunity he detected in the first novella. That, in a sense, he was rewriting the first novella from a less romantic perspective. There's a kiss in the first novella which maybe shouldn't have been there, an act of reciprocation which gives some credence to Mary Louise's lifelong romantic obsession with her cousin. In a sense this kiss makes her narrative more reliable than it needs to be. At times it felt like Trevor was extolling the virtues of romantic feeling and missed a rich opportunity to question its hidden purposes and even its validity. And there perhaps was sown the seed of giving the second novella an utterly unreliable narrator. The sparse prose took a while for me to get into, but to brilliant effect—this is a story I would recommend strongly, in a solid four star kind of way, in a way that keeps you feeling something indefinable but persistent. Both "Reading Turgenev" and "My House in Umbria" are gorgeously wrought novels. Each is infused with Trevor's trademark melancholy, bleakness, insight, subtle wit, and above all, his tremendous compassion for the entire human race.

Full disclosure: I spent my adolescence reading gossipy accounts of Gertrude Stein's involvement with William James, with Hemingway, with Picasso, with the Shakespeare and Co. people, with the whole coterie surrounding the first performance of Les Rites des Printemps. The woman knew every one who was even remotely fascinating in early 20th century western culture. Plus, she was so darn dramatic and moody, saying all kinds of epigrammatically horrible things about the people who were supposed to be her friends, and not really respecting any gender norms whatsoever. I read everything I could get my hands on about her, kind of the way other girls my age were reading all about River Phoenix. I cannot imagine his life growing up. Nor can I imagine his father Randolph's life either - who was forced out of his house when he was 13 after his mother and her then current boyfriend thought he was too much trouble. Randolph always worked hard at whatever he did. He took pride in his work and seems to have instilled those values in two of his sons (the third Dennis died of drug related problems). The small diner he owned for a couple of decades did everything from scratch and was a neighborhood institution. Popularity of this novel written by C. E. Antarova was fated by the successful synthesis of both Eastern and Western esoteric traditions. Larry Elder opens the door to the area of his life where his relationship to his father and in many ways the rest of his family exists. The story is brutal in its honesty. The lesson in this story is a true diamond in the rough. The "first one" was "My House in Umbria," the story of Emily Delahunty, though most readers consider "Reading Turgenev" the superior novella. Certainly the Booker committee did when they shortlisted it for the prize in 1991.

It takes a long time to read The Making of Americans. The language Stein writes in (after cutting herself loose from the conventional language of the opening Dehning section) is not the transparent language through which we enter stories, forgetting we are reading. We never forget we are reading while reading The Making of Americans. Stein seems to be transcribing rather thanMore than once, Seth worries that he has betrayed them, by making their private lives public; she especially might have disapproved. But his motives are generous, and the breadth of the canvas is ample justification. "Some there be," runs a passage in Ecclesiasticus, "which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been." Henny and Shanti had no children. But they did have an author for a great-nephew. And his Two Lives is a stay against their oblivion.

Humor and elegance are just two of many words to describe Reeve Lindbergh’s Two Lives. She shares both her busy life on her beloved sheep farm and her public life, answering the questions Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh refused to entertain. She gives us hope for finding balance in our far too busy lives." I’ll add that “... Turgenev” had the stronger opening, and “Umbria” the more mesmerizing ending; What a superb idea to combine the two into one volume! Shanti Behari Seth was born and brought up in India in the late years of the Raj, and was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin to study medicine and dentistry. It was here that Shanti’s path first crossed that of his future wife, as a lodger in her father’s house. Henny Gerda Caro was born in Berlin, to a Jewish family, cultured, patriotic and intensely German. A friendship flowered between them, and when Henny fled Hitler’s Germany for England, just a month before the war broke out, she was met at Victoria Station by the only person she knew in that country: Shanti. Two Lives is composed of two elegant and elegiac novels, each centering on a fiftysomething woman and each taking place during the summer of 1987.

While Two Lives is, on the surface, a double biography, perhaps it is more an intensely personal journey for Vikram Seth-an opportunity to explore the many sides of his uncle, Shanti, and his aunt, Henny, two people who loved and cared for him and were fixed points in his own firmament for most of his life. In doing that for himself, he delivers a subtle, yet affecting gift to his readers. The implicit collusion of Stein and Toklas with Bernard Fay - who at the time was busily compiling lists of Freemasons for the Nazis to arrest - was troubling in the extreme. What they did to obtain and hold onto their beautiful country house may have been immoral, at the very least it was achieved with the protection of Fay and his like. Henny's story is one that Seth didn't expect to be able to tell in detail: not only was she reticent about her past ("it's no good going into the graveyard," she liked to say), but after she died, a grieving Shanti destroyed all her photographs and mementoes. One trunk in the attic escaped his notice, however, and its contents - mostly letters - gave Seth access to a world she refused to discuss even with her husband. The journey takes him to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, where her mother and sister perished. It's a horribly familiar story, but less so to Seth than to most Europeans, and he tells it with cold fury, admitting that one of the casualties of his research was his pleasure in the German language. Concordia Evgenievna Antarova was born in 1886 April 13 in Warsaw. She lost her father when she was eleven years old, so then she was living with her mother. When she was fourteen years old, being in the sixth grade of a secondary school, she also lost her mother, but she continued her studies and finished the school. Having finished the school, she decided to enter a nunnery. She learned a lot while being in it, and the church choir helped to develop her inborn musical talent. However, she was always feeling that the life of the cloister was not for her. She met Saint John of Kronstadt, and he told her that she was fated to work and live among other people.

Barbara Will's penetrating study Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma delineates the deep biographical and artistic connections between Stein and fascism. Exploring Nature: Beetles & Bugs: A Captivating Inside View Of The Life Of Two Of The Most Successful Insect Species On The Planet, With Over 200 Pictures.

Janet Malcolm was a journalist, biographer, collagist, and staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of In the Freud Archives and The Crime of Sheila McGough, as well as biographies of Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, and Anton Chekhov.