The transplanted man /

Brilliantly weaving together elements of the Indian immigrant experience with ideas from modern medical science, Nigam sets his second novel in a Manhattan hospital, presenting a wry, revelatory look at the effects of displacement on contemporary life. The protagonist is a talented young resident, Dr. Sunit "Sonny" Seth, who gets caught up in the strange case of an Indian politician known as the "transplanted man" because virtually every organ in his body has been replaced. As Seth battles his patient's kidney failure, his treatment is complicated by the presence of a former Indian film actor-turned-politico named Kakkar, who plots the politician's downfall. Seth's off-hours become equally turbulent when he gets involved with a libidinous British nurse named Gwen, and his calamitous hospital existence begins to overwhelm his love life. Nigam spins out subplots with reckless abandon, from the story of a sleep researcher who stumbles into a cure for insomnia that almost costs him his marriage to the evolution of a near-catatonic homeless man who inadvertently becomes a local sage on the streets of Little India. Nigam adds to the ironic, absurd humor with some elegant, graceful writing about sleep, love, sex and death, filtering much of it through the lens of medical science. This novel is broader in scope than Nigam's successful, India-based debut, The Snake Charmer. While somewhat overplotted, it establishes Nigam as a major voice in contemporary Indian-American literature, offering a combination of challenging ideas and luminous, humorous prose. (Aug.) Forecast: Nigam's talent for humor distinguishes him from the host of excellent Indian writers competing for readers' attention. The Snake Charmer set the stage for Nigam;Transplanted Man should make his name. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This second novel (after The Snake Charmer) should earn acclaim for Nigam, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Funny but not unintelligent, mocking but not mean-spirited (especially toward health professionals), it involves several odd characters who work in a New York City hospital serving Little India, where cultures intersect but never quite fuse. Sonny Seth, our brilliant leading man, is a natural-born healer and regular sleepwalker who, while completing his residency, treats the seriously ill Transplanted Man. A high-ranking Indian politician, this patient has survived transplants of most major organs. However, he is clearly not the only "transplanted" person populating this novel's pages. Most of Nigam's eccentrics are searching for prominence, purpose, or peace-not to mention a good night's sleep-but all of them are seeking a sense of belonging as they return from their own emotional, geographical, physical, or cultural diasporas. Recommended.-Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon, Eugene (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A sort of curried Scrubs, in which physician/novelist Nigam (The Snake Charmer, 1998) takes us on Grand Rounds through a New York City hospital staffed largely by Indian expatriates. During his residency, Sonny Seth finds himself faced with weird conditions and even weirder patients every day and is given very little time to think about them. Raised in Arizona, Sonny is of Indian birth, but he never knew his father and seems more at ease with American culture than do many of his (largely Indian) patients. There's Sonali, for instance, whose husband Nishad became so obsessed with her buttocks that he succumbed to temptation one night and took a bite out of one of them (which became badly infected). There's the Comatose Patient, who is actually perfectly lucid but pretends to be unconscious to avoid dealing with his wife and mistress (who hate him). And the Transplanted Man, in for kidney dialysis, has over the years exchanged his lungs, corneas, pancreas, heart, and liver for new models. Minister of Health in the Indian government, the Transplanted Man is thought to have a good shot at becoming the next prime minister, but there are financial scandals in his past-and his opponents are making hay of his tendency to travel abroad for medical treatment. One of his regular visitors is the Uriah Heep-ish Sharad Kakkar, a Bollywood matinee idol who wants to enter politics and is trying to wrest an endorsement from the Transplanted Man's feeble fingers. Sonny grows close to the Transplanted Man, who turns out to have more of a connection with him than he would have guessed. Nigam's cast of characters is large enough to provide plenty of distraction (a psychotherapist named Dr. Guru; a scientist who may have discovered a cure for insomnia; etc.) but not too numerous to overwhelm. A good read, with interesting and credible characters working their way through the chaos of modern hospital life.