In a beautifully rendered but slight debut novel about the getting of wisdom, an Indian snake charmer struggles to find meaning after he impetuously destroys what he loves most. While Sonalal, the snake charmer, is a fully realized creation, his story may have been better suited for a novella, for it doesn—t, good as it is, quite fill out the more ample contours of a novel. Author Nigam, though, does lyrically evoke the place, Delhi, and the mood—arising from the consuming need to atone and understand—as he tells this story of the most talented snake charmer and musician in all of India. Middle-aged Sonalal is one of the many street artists and beggars who gather at Hamayun’s Tomb in Delhi to entertain or fleece the tourists. One day, to revive a tired Raju, his snake, who had been performing all day, Sonalal plays music that, had it been recorded, might have guaranteed him immortality. Raju responds, but when Sonalal goes on to play a note wrong, the snake stops dancing, and the humiliated musician picks him up and bites him in two. The act makes Sonalal a celebrity and temporarily wealthy, but he’s heartbroken and horrified by what he’s done to his beloved Raju. His wife is a shrew, his children despise him, and only Raju, he believes, understood him. Grieving, despairing of his life, he becomes impotent; he also fears that Raju’s mate is pursuing him. As he searches for answers, Sonalal consults doctors, magicians, and fellow charmers. Then his impotence is cured by Reena, a prostitute whom he loves, and he acquires another snake—even though he never attains with him that moment of godlike perfection he’d shared with Raju. A narrowly averted disaster helps him finally understand that the perfection he had briefly known (—the ether that smelled like a freshly cut mango—) still exists but is hard to attain. A small gem of a story that entertains, moves—and, naturally, charms.
Pub Date: June 9, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15809-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Short, to the point, and absolutely unremarkable: sure to be another medium-hot romance-lite hit for Sparks, who at the very...
A mother unburdens a story of past romance to her troubled daughter for no good reason.
Adrienne Willis is a middle-aged mother with three kids who, not surprisingly, finds herself in an emotional lurch after her husband dumps her for a younger, prettier thing. Needing to recharge her batteries, Adrienne takes a holiday, watching over her friend’s small bed-and-breakfast in the North Carolina beach town of Rodanthe. Then Dr. Paul Flanner appears, himself a cold fish in need of a little warming up. This is the scene laid out by Adrienne to her daughter, Amanda, in a framing device of unusual crudity from Sparks (A Bend in the Road, 2001, etc.). Amanda’s husband has recently died and she hasn’t quite gotten around to figuring out how to keep on living. Imagining that nothing is better for a broken heart than somebody else’s sad story, Adrienne tells her daughter about the great lost love of her life. Paul came to Rodanthe in order to speak with the bereaved family of a woman who had just died after he had operated on her. Paul, of course, was not to blame, but still he suffers inside. Add to that a recent divorce and an estranged child and the result is a tortured soul whom Adrienne finds absolutely irresistible. Of course, the beach, an impending storm, the fact that there are no other visitors around, a roaring fireplace, and any number of moments that could have been culled from a J. Crew catalogue and a Folgers’s commercial make romance just about inevitable. Sparks couldn’t be less subtle in this harshly mechanical story that adheres to formula in a way that would make an assembly-line romance writer blush.
Short, to the point, and absolutely unremarkable: sure to be another medium-hot romance-lite hit for Sparks, who at the very least can never be accused of overstaying his welcome.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-446-53133-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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