Seth's portrait of an improbable marriage

Two Lives
By Vikram Seth
HarperCollins, 503 pp., illustrated, $27.95

In 1969, a young Vikram Seth left his native Calcutta to go to Tonbridge, a boys' boarding school a few miles southeast of London. He was 17 years old, and his parents had insisted that during his time at Tonbridge and, later, at Oxford, he was to live with his great-uncle, a dentist and World War II veteran named Shanti Behari Seth (Shanti Uncle), and his wife, Helga Gerda Caro (Auntie Henny), a German-born Jew who had fled Berlin for England in 1939. Young Seth hardly knew the couple at the time, and yet, over the next 20 years, their relationship would grow so close that they would consider him the son they never had. It is this odd couple, the rotund, expansive Shanti and the tall, reserved Henny, whom Seth writes about in ''Two Lives."

Seth first appeared on the literary scene in 1980 with ''Mappings," a poetry collection. A prolific writer, he went on to publish four other volumes of poetry, a travel memoir, and even a libretto. But it is as a novelist that he has made a name for himself: ''A Suitable Boy," a 1,300-page saga set in a newly independent India, was published in 1993 and remains the book for which he is best known. ''Two Lives" is Seth's 11th book, his second memoir, the first about his family, and in the tradition of his earlier works, it is a 500-page volume, with plenty of details and digressions.

Like Seth, Shanti Uncle had left his native India to go to college. Thanks to help from his older brother Raj, who was paying his fees, Shanti arrived in Germany to study dentistry in 1931. Every few months, he changed boardinghouses, hoping to find cheaper accommodations. So it was that, in 1933, Shanti arrived at Ella Caro's house in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin. She rented him a room in her flat, much to the displeasure of her daughter Henny, who exclaimed, ''Don't take the black man." But Mrs. Caro did take him in, a decision that would have a profound effect on Henny's and Shanti's lives, as well as on those of others around them. Shanti completed his training in dentistry, but, unable to find work in a nationalistic Germany, he left Berlin for Britain in 1937.

Meanwhile, Henny and her family endured increasingly brutal restrictions by the Nazis. Their struggle to retain their dignity even as they are relieved of all their possessions (their silver, their furs, their radio, their money, and, finally, many of their lives) is deeply affecting, and the passages on Kristallnacht and other horrific measures against Jews are thoroughly researched. Henny's brother, Heinz, fled to Argentina fairly quickly, but Henny's mother and her sister, Lola, didn't have the means to leave. After years of hardship, Henny managed to flee Germany in 1939, arriving in London by train, where the only person she knew in England, the person who met her at the station, the only link she had between this new life and the old, was the boarder her family had taken in years before -- Shanti.

Shortly after Henny's arrival in London, Britain entered the war. Shanti enlisted and was dispatched with the Army Dental Corps to the Sudan and later to Italy, where a bomb severed his right arm -- a tragedy for a man who made his living with his hands. Depressed, Shanti found solace in the letters he received from Henny. He returned to London, where he trained himself to practice dentistry using only his left hand. His relationship with Henny had turned romantic, and they eventually married in 1951, when they were both in their early 40s.

Although Seth did an enormous amount of research for this book, the reader never gets very close to the inscrutable Henny. Seth's only sources for drawing this intriguing, mysterious woman are his and his uncle's memories of her, as well as her correspondence. But Henny's letters are, by her friends' own admission, rather distant, leaving Seth to speculate on her frame of mind, on her feelings for the German fiancé who abandoned her, and for the man whom she married. Because Seth never interviewed her during her lifetime (one gets the sense she would have been too private to want to speak about such things), the resulting portrait doesn't quite satisfy.

''Two Lives" would have more properly been called ''Three Lives," for the book tells the story not just of Shanti and Henny but also of Seth -- his time at Tonbridge, Oxford, and Stanford, his struggle to learn German (like his uncle's, 40 years earlier), his travels through Europe as a student, his work in China, his decision to write fiction, the research he undertook, his views on the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the question of the old Palestine, and his feelings about his uncle's decision to leave most of the family out of his will. In this sense, the book is both biography and memoir, and in trying to do both it doesn't quite succeed at either. This might have made for a better book had Seth devoted his considerable talent to a novel based on Shanti and Henny's improbable yet lasting relationship, and their lives in Germany and Britain before and after World War II. As it stands, however, ''Two Lives" delivers an incomplete portrait of a fascinating couple.

Laila Lalami's novel, ''Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits," was published in October. She is the editor of the literary blog Moorishgirl.com.