Review 400: Transplanted Man

Transplanted Man by Sanjay Nigam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is centered around a hospital in New York’s “Little India” with the doctors, patients, and other workers as the characters. There are several themes in this book, primarily seems to be about sleep disturbances and relationship problems, but that is not all. Yet there is a lot of humor in the book as well, perhaps as taking life to an extreme, such as one of the first couples in the E.R. we meet is where the man took a severe bite on his wife’s buttocks. This bite, of course, does lead to problems in the marriage.

Sonny is a resident doctor, who sleepwalks, and has a healing touch. One of the main patients is a politician from India with so many transplanted organs he is known as the Transplant Man. Thus, we get the title of the book, but it is a double meaning, as most of the people are transplants from India.

We follow Sonny with a relationship with an English Indophile nurse, Gwen, who loves literature but found her calling with helping people instead. She has her own unknown illness which caused relationship issues before.

There are many characters in the book, seemingly follow them all, but it doesn’t become confusing as they are distinct enough and introduced slowly. The book doesn’t seem to have much of a plot itself, we just follow these characters and see what happens, much like a year in the life of type story. Everyone does have some transformations of sorts, so it is not static in any way. An entertaining book.