Memoir: Early in 1933, Shanti Seth, a young man from a middle-class Indian family who was training in Berlin as a dentist, took a room in a house near the city's Dental Institute. His landlady was a Mrs Caro, newly widowed and a mother of three adult children: Lola, Henny and Heinz.
The Caros were Jews, assimilated and culturally German. Their friends were a mix of Jews and Christians and it wasn't long before the new lodger was an intimate of their lively circle. Lola, the oldest daughter, fell in love with him, while he fell in love with Henny, who in turn was in love with Hans, her employer's son. Henny and Hans did not marry and she emigrated to England in the summer of 1939. She was met at Victoria Station by the only man she knew in London, Shanti (he had left Germany the year before). Her brother, Heinz, went to South America around the same time. Mrs Caro and Lola were left behind in Berlin.
Henny spent the war in London, while Shanti served in the army - he lost his right hand at Monte Cassino. In 1945 Henny resumed contact with her Berlin friends. The news from home was terrible. Her mother had died in Theresienstadt (in then Czechoslovakia), while Lola had been murdered in Birkenau. Hans had married a Polish Christian to save himself: he was half-Jewish. Of the rest, whether Jew or Gentile, all had made appalling accommodations with National Socialism in order to survive - worse, it transpired most had failed to treat Mrs Caro or Lola properly.
Though she was never again the woman she had been, Henny survived the news, and in March 1951, she and Shanti married. They spent their entire married life in the London suburb of Hendon where Shanti practised as a dentist (using a prosthetic hand). Their social life revolved around bridge. They probably never revisited Germany and certainly never went to India. They always spoke English, except for their quarrels, which were through German. They had no children. Henny died in 1988, aged 80, and Shanti in 1998, aged 90.
The narrator of the story is the versatile Indian writer, Vikram Seth, Shanti's great-nephew. He has opted to tell the story of his subject's lives not in the order in which they lived them but in the order in which he made his discoveries about them. Thus, we start with Vikram living with Henny and Shanti in Hendon while he does his A-levels. This is in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The young Seth does not ask his aunt about her pre-war life, although he knows she is a Berlin-born Jew with a history.
Later, when he gets famous (Henny is by this stage dead), his mother suggests he interview Shanti about his life, and he does. Part of the book is constructed from those interviews. Then - and what a stroke of luck - Vikram's father finds the trunk Henny brought from Berlin to London in the attic of the Hendon house. It is full of documents from Henny's German life (love poems from Hans, for example) as well as her post-war correspondence with her circle. These letters form the book's radioactive core. To complete the story, Vikram Seth uses the testimony of Indian family members who witnessed Shanti and Henny's last years.
In a beautiful image, Seth describes himself as a third braid wrapped around the book's two principle strands. In the sense that he is family this is true, but really he is an impresario who has organised the material so that its qualities are shown off to their best advantage. He is a faultless guide who understands that the story can't be hurried, and that any jazzing-up of the material is fatal. Like the best documentary storytellers, he allows the characters to speak for themselves (as they do throughout in their letters, which he quotes from at length), and he trusts that they will move the reader when they speak in their own words, far more than he could ever hope to do.
Some will find the narrative slow. It is slow, but when it hurts, oh, how it hurts. For example, when Henny writes in a letter to Shanti - which Seth quotes in full - that in the event of her death (she was writing during the Blitz) Shanti is to tell Hans that she kept herself for him, I had to stop reading.
Similarly, when I read the correspondence between Henny and the German state in the 1950s, regarding compensation for her loss of earnings after she could no longer work in Germany because she was a Jew, and I came across some functionary's assertion that compensation could not be given to her because the documents confirming she lost her job because of Nazi measures could not be located, again I had to stop reading. Just like the makers of a certain beer claim in their advertisement, Two Lives reaches places other books never reach.
The fate of Germany's Jewry has produced an impressive literature, and I have no doubt Two Lives will join the list. Through the lives of its two protagonists Seth shows us what goes wrong when we give in to bigotry: we get death and misery and it is salutary to be reminded of that. But these are the most accessible aspects of the catastrophe, the tip of the iceberg if you like.
What Seth manages, like the great German writer WG Sebald, is to show us the greater bulk that lies beneath the surface. Besides killing, the Holocaust smashed a complex web of tender-hearted human relations between people, and left the survivors alienated from themselves and each other afterwards. We can all talk numbers but only a great writer like Vikram Seth can give us a true sense of the weight and value of the people who were taken, in order therefore that we can know firstly what was lost and, secondly, the pain that those who lived on went through afterwards.
Carlo Gébler's The Siege of Derry: A History was published in in March and The Bull Raid, a new version of The Táin, or the Cattle Raid of Cooley, in July. He is writer-in-residence at HMP Maghaberry, Co Antrim
Two Lives by Vikram Seth. Little Brown, 501pp. £20