Vikram Seth

has written a book about his uncle (Indian Hindu) and aunt (German Jewish) and their entertwined lives. I have just started reading it, after hearing is terrific presentation the other night at Politics and Prose. What a charming presenter.

Is the book well written? Here is from the final chapter (I didn't cheat; he read this portion at the store):

"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 pilgramage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that ccleave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable.

Yet seeing through a glass, however darkly, is to be less blind. That is what has motivated this effort; that is all I have hoped would result. These two people whom I love and who loved me may not, in differing degrees, have wanted every stroke - sometimes distorted, sometimes overexplicit - of this portrait. but they are dead and past caring; and I want them complexly remembered - in sickness as in health, in weakness as in strength, in secrecy and in openness. Their lives were cardinal points for me, and guide me still; I want to mark them true."