Snake Charmer

In The New Yorker last summer, Bill Buford pointed to the irresistibility of Indian prose: "There are qualities in its language that you won't find elsewhere . . . sometimes its use is more exacting, more precise, more clearly articulated . . . as if it were of a different and more disciplined world." And so it is with Sanjay Nigam's debut novel that brilliantly maintains the fine balance between simple and extravagant, apparent and real, and peculiar and universal.

Sonalal, middle-aged and unloved by his insatiable wife and disrespectful sons, is, undisputedly, the best snake charmer in all of India because he has elevated the beggar's trade to a delicate art. One evening, while charming his beloved snake, Raju, Sonalal produces a music so extraordinary that he feels touched by the gods. But in a moment that will change his life forever, his rapture turns to rage and Sonalal ruins the one being who loved him. Plunged into unfathomable despair, Sonalal winds his way through a landscape paved with conundrums, and enters the lives of a collection of tender characters -- including a woman who is his soul mate and savior from the crisis of middle age.

In electric prose that is stunningly lyrical, Sanjay Nigam combines Arundhati Roy's unforgettable sense of place with the storytelling prowess of Milan Kundera. And, in so doing, Nigam has created a modern-day fable about the nature of love, perfection, and the strange places in which manhood is ultimately found.