The cover of Snake Lake is a Photoshopped mess: Tibetan motifs, a snakeskin pattern, a golden Buddha, all against the backdrop of a pristine lake and mountains that anyone familiar with Nepal will immediately recognise as having nothing to do with modern-day Kathmandu, where the book is mostly set. The juxtaposition of elements is clunky and clichéd. Yet the cover's failings inadvertently point precisely to what makes Snake Lake a remarkably absorbing book. Unlike the cover, Jeff Greenwald succeeds in fitting seemingly incongruous elements – Kathmandu and Berkeley, myth and modernity, Buddhism and riots – into a cohesive and pleasing whole. Though much of the book is about contrasts of time and place, Greenwald's forte here is not as a travel writer or historian but as biographer and autobiographer, and Snake Lake succeeds primarily as a viscerally honest account of the author's personal struggle to come to terms with love and loss.
Our tale begins with Greenwald's recollections of his time in Kathmandu as a correspondent for the San Fransisco Examiner covering Nepal's popular movement for democracy in 1990, the first Jana Andolan. The book is named after the capital's Nag Pokhari, an old algae-green pond that, as legend would have it, still houses the nagas, serpent kings that ruled the valley when it was still a giant lake. Greenwald is clearly taken by the place and its mythology, and peppers his book with the many naga myths that still survive in Kathmandu today. Having left his native US, Greenwald enthusiastically immerses himself in Nepali politics, finding his way to street protests, interviewing strike leaders and obeying the 'voluntary' blackouts imposed by pro-democracy groups as a form of protest against the entrenched monarchy. Along the way, he begins to attend lectures on Buddhism from a humorous and charismatic Tibetan lama, falls for an American photojournalist, and searches the city for friends willing to let him use their fax machines to file stories in clear violation of the royal government's media blackout. Greenwald paces the narrative well, flavouring it with frequent asides on the ancient history and mythology that inhabit Kathmandu.
Released a full two decades after the events it describes, Snake Lake would be hopelessly outdated if it were not also somewhat prescient. Greenwald faithfully describes Kathmandu's elation in the wake of King Birendra's eventual agreement to democratic elections, but the author is too cautious to get carried away. His misgivings at the time – that Nepal had little understanding of how to put the concept of democracy into practice, that most ordinary Nepalis outside Kathmandu would see little benefit from the revolution, and that in allowing the king to stay on as a constitutional monarch the country, 'hamstrung by tradition … had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory' – point with remarkable accuracy to some of the problems Nepal would face in the following years. Greenwald's treatment of the politics and history leading up to 1990, though, is quite shallow, and anyone already versed in Nepali history will find little of historical value here. Still, as an engaging primer on the period, and as a chronicle of the passions and brutality unleashed in Kathmandu's streets at the time, Snake Lake does well.
Still, for all his fascination with the city, Greenwald's portrait of it rings a bit hollow. His professions of love for Kathmandu are eloquent and unquestionably genuine, and his evocative descriptions suggest true intimacy. But the picture of Kathmandu that Greenwald offers seems rather narrow in what it shows of the city's inhabitants. We are introduced to his new girlfriend, to a witty British businessman and his beautiful wife, and to a number of Kathmandu's more notorious expatriates, many of whom are generously described. When it comes to the Nepalis, however, Greenwald's Kathmandu seems sparsely populated. He does introduce us to the lethargic priest at his neighbourhood shrine, to his pilot neighbour and to a disenchanted newspaper editor, but the author's relationships with these men are clearly distant, lacking much candour or affection. As a work that seeks to introduce its readers to a place few of them would be familiar with, then, Snake Lake falls short.