If Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope has a shape of its own, it is one altogether outside the duality of the Western mind. Such is both the intent and fascination of this first-person narration of a Hindu-French marriage in terms of the metaphysical quest on both sides. As one travels with it from France to India on its various threads of time-place description, seeing the persona at both the inner and the impersonal distance, participating in talk-reflection which ranges, with a scholar's emotion, from Judao-Christian ethic through all Vedanta lore, one is brilliantly seduced away from the a priori Western world into an Indian one that seems far more natural…. [The] ultimate sensation left by the book is deeper than instruction, and far and away from the fashion for such angularly repellent mimicry as Hesse's Siddhartha or even Mann's Transposed Heads. Rao's talent is to lead...