The Snake Charmer: A Novel - Hardcover

Nigam, Sanjay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688158099 ISBN 13: 9780688158095

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1998

Synopsis

Sonalal, a middle-aged, accomplished snake charmer is playing his music one night when, overwhelmed by rage, he kills the one creature who loved him, an act that changes his life and future forever

About this title

About the Author

Sanjay Nigam is on the Harvard faculty.

Reviews

Indian-born Nigam, a physician who teaches at Harvard, has written a rather derivative fable about the fleeting nature of fame and fortune and about a life "ruined by a single moment of stupidity." Expanded?perhaps overexpanded?from a short story originally published in Grand Street, Nigam's debut tells the tale of a renowned snake charmer in New Delhi, who, bitten by his beloved defanged cobra, bites it back in a fit of rage, splitting the snake in half and accidentally killing it. Impoverished and tormented by guilt and remorse, middle-aged Sonalal loses his sexual potency and his gift for playing music. He's haunted by recurrent nightmares in which the deceased snake's female mate exacts lethal revenge on him. While the exotic trappings of Sonalal's midlife crisis will certainly attract a Western audience, the novel is too contrived (and too long), and its self-consciously elegant prose is uncomfortably at odds with the teeming slums it so prettily describes. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Even his obstinate wife admits that Sonalal is the best snake charmer in India, but when his adored cobra, Raju, bites him he bites back -- cutting the elderly snake in two and severing his own life into 'before' and 'after.' This arresting and old-fashioned first novel is about fleeting renown, sex, betrayal, and, in the end, making do -- which, as the author clearly knows, attends any life in art.

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 doesnt, 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 moodarising 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 hes 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 snakeeven 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, movesand, naturally, charms. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688158099
• ISBN 13: 9780688158095
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 223