When Dr. Namita Kumari of the University of Delhi wrote to me to ask me to review her novel The Serpent’s Longing, she said, the “novel is rooted in the founding legend of Funan — one of the earliest kingdoms of Southeast Asia, preserved in 3rd-century Chinese chronicles and Cambodian oral tradition,” and I was hooked. I love mythology in any culture, which is part of why, in college, I took every course in non-western art history and architecture that I could. I also had the pleasure of visiting Angkor Wat with my brother in 2005 (or was it 2006? God, I need to get on a plane again), but I knew nothing of the Funan Empire. What I didn’t realize is that I was about to read a gorgeously written love story that would teach me something I still need to learn about grief.
The Power of Choice in Loving Across Lines
The story begins with Kaundinya, a holy man who’s lived in solitude but who feels drawn out of that solitude to cross the eastern seas. There he meets Soma, a Naga princess. She, as the blade of the kingdom, has been sent to investigate the rumors of this man, but they are immediately drawn to one another. The way I’ve written it could be the beginning of any tawdry romance novel. The way Kumari writes it is lush and incantatory as she uses phrases like “stone that outlasted dynasties” and “a place where growing and dying happened so fast and so close together that they had stopped being opposites” to describe the environment.
Soma’s mother, the queen, advises her that “To love one of them, a human, is to become one,” explaining from experience that she who had been “three shapes before the sun was up” would be giving up her power of shape shifting if she chooses to love Kaundinya. She is afraid of becoming singular, but returns to meet him in the forest again and again.
Kaundinya also has something to lose by loving Soma as the powers he has spent a lifetime perfecting drain from him the closer they get.
“He was tired in a way he had not been in years. Not in the body; the body had been trained past ordinary fatigue long ago. This was the tiredness of return, of a mind shaped by the great silence of the heights now taking in the low constant noise of people. He moved through it as he had moved through every hardship of his practice: feeling it fully, holding to it not at all.” – The Serpent’s Longing, Namita Kumari
He waits as she continues to visit and they experience dreams that don’t imagine, they remember. Soma allows Kaundinya to see her many faces and all the while the potential cost of their love hangs over the choice they must make about whether to be together. But it’s not all about costs because it’s clear from the prose that there is beauty in allowing themselves to be seen, too.
“The woman did not vanish. That was the first wrong thing he had believed, that the serpent would replace her, that one would be a mask over the other. Instead she opened.” – The Serpent’s Longing, Namita Kumari
Soma’s sister, Takshaki, plots against the couple as she seeks the eventual throne, setting into motion the rest of the plot. And all the while something is changing in the water that used to be fresh and free of darkness.
I could have told you all of the above without finishing the book, but I kept reading because the writer’s enchantment pulled me forward with triumphant prose that belongs alongside that of Rebecca Roanhorse and Sabaa Tahir.
“[T]he great prices of a life get paid either way, chosen or unchosen, and… the only freedom anywhere in any of the roads was to choose” – The Serpent’s Longing, Namita Kumari
Exploring Grief and Shared Burdens
The potential to lose the ones you love is my kryptonite, a fear formed when I was very young and one I let stunt me still. It’s also inevitable and I’m grateful for the ways Kumari helped me reexamine grief in The Serpent’s Longing. Soma and Kaundinya have to deal with her potential grief over losing him, because he is mortal and she will certainly outlive him. But they also have to deal with the queen’s grief.
“[L]ives are rich because they are short, that the shortness is the whole of it, that a thing you will lose is the only kind of thing you can hold this way” – The Serpent’s Longing, Namita Kumari
Without going into too much detail, Soma and Kaundinya discover by going into the deep dark together the beauty of sharing a burden and that “the absence of the weight is not rest. It is only absence.” They also embrace the fact that “loving means losing and choose it anyway.”
I totally wept while reading this book. But I also felt restored. Because there is a lot more power in opening yourself to love than there is to sitting inside your fear of what could be lost. This may be a book I need to read again someday. For now I am grateful for the huge hug it made me bestow on my husband, a hug that he returned with equal intensity.
I have no affiliate link to offer for this book, but I hope you’ll find a copy and read it. It was a genuine pleasure to read.
The novel centers on Emahn, a Punjabi girl being raised in the U.A.E. with her family who has deep roots in Lahore. Most of the book is in Emahn’s delightful and precocious first-person voice. Poems and myths are also woven in, and from all of this we get a full, rich, and loving picture of Emahn’s family’s life in both countries. This makes us care for her and for them. In life, I also hope that raising a child with this much love builds resilience.
This slim collection of short stories from Spain contains six sharp looks at different kinds of family secrets: abuse, sexual assault, pregnancy, sexual orientation, adultery, and the process of dying. As most successful short story writers do, López has centered these narratives around key moments so that we’re immediately in the mix.
On the other side of the brevity spectrum is Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye which chronicles life in a small Ohio town over the period of an entire life. The story centers on the Jenkins and Salt families and the way their lives entwine over time. As with All the Things We Don’t Say, there are secrets here, including adultery, sexual orientation, and abandonment, and those secrets shape the destinies of everyone involved. Because it’s such a sweeping book, Ryan can linger on the social events that background (and shape) their lives as well, including wars and the Civil Rights movement. 
Though Robert Grainier is said in Train Dreams not to have made it much farther into Montana than Libby, the setting of both stories is similar, both in place and time, though the main action of A River Runs Through It covers a shorter span. Part of what I will always love about these movies, then, is that they remind me of where I grew up. More on imagery below, but there are moments in Train Dreams where I saw the specific texture of bark and the particular splay of needles and thought, “I know that tree!” Both do an excellent job of capturing the expanse of the quiet landscape of the Inland Northwest.
Whereas I can no longer separate the film and book of A River Runs Through It, because they mirror each other so closely and because I’ve read and watched them so many times, I cannot remember reading Train Dreams, though I imagine it was a quiet book and meditative because the movie is this way (and you don’t usually remove the splashy bits when going from page to screen). What I will carry forward from Train Dreams is the imagery, which is perhaps even stronger than the imagery in A River Runs Through It (as beautiful as that was). 
The book centers on twin sisters, Agni and Effie who live with their Greek-born parents in Astoria, Queens while going to college. Effie is wilder and Agni quieter, and the fact that they are twins already gives us a chance to explore two ways of blooming from the same circumstance. But because of their heritage and close family ties, we get two other what ifs: living the diaspora or returning home and whether to embrace the city or the country.