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House of Snow: An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal
'If you want a book in English that tells you about Nepalese thinking, and gives a taste of the country's contemporary literature, you could hardly do better than House of Snow ' Daily Telegraph
'One of the finest books I have read this year' Nudge Books
'A well-curated sliver of works that highlight the richness and variety of Nepal's literary contribution' Kathmandu Post In 2015, Sagarmatha frowned. Tectonic plates moved. A deadly earthquake devastated Nepal. In the wake of disaster, House of Snow brings together over 50 excerpts of fiction and non-fiction celebrating the breathtaking landscapes and rich cultural heritage of this fascinating country. Here are explorers and mountaineers, poets and political journalists, national treasures and international celebrities. Featuring a diverse cast of writers such as Michael Palin and Jon Krakauer, Lakshmīprāsad Devkoṭā and Lil Bahadur Chettri – all hand-picked by well-known authors and scholars of Nepali literature including Samrat Upadhyay, Michael Hutt, Isabella Tree and Thomas Bell. House of Snow is the biggest, most comprehensive and most beautiful collection of writing about Nepal in print.
'One of the finest books I have read this year' Nudge Books
'A well-curated sliver of works that highlight the richness and variety of Nepal's literary contribution' Kathmandu Post In 2015, Sagarmatha frowned. Tectonic plates moved. A deadly earthquake devastated Nepal. In the wake of disaster, House of Snow brings together over 50 excerpts of fiction and non-fiction celebrating the breathtaking landscapes and rich cultural heritage of this fascinating country. Here are explorers and mountaineers, poets and political journalists, national treasures and international celebrities. Featuring a diverse cast of writers such as Michael Palin and Jon Krakauer, Lakshmīprāsad Devkoṭā and Lil Bahadur Chettri – all hand-picked by well-known authors and scholars of Nepali literature including Samrat Upadhyay, Michael Hutt, Isabella Tree and Thomas Bell. House of Snow is the biggest, most comprehensive and most beautiful collection of writing about Nepal in print.
583 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 11, 2016
74 people are currently reading
451 people want to read
About the author
Ranulph Fiennes
98 books289 followersSir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd Baronet, OBE, better known as Ranulph (Ran) Fiennes, is a British adventurer and holder of several endurance records.
Fiennes has written books about his army service and his expeditions as well as a book defending Robert Falcon Scott from modern revisionists. In May 2009, aged 65, he climbed to the summit of Mount Everest. According to the Guinness Book of World Records he is the world's greatest living adventurer.
Fiennes has written books about his army service and his expeditions as well as a book defending Robert Falcon Scott from modern revisionists. In May 2009, aged 65, he climbed to the summit of Mount Everest. According to the Guinness Book of World Records he is the world's greatest living adventurer.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 9, 2018
Wow
A beautiful, horrific, and informative collection of stories about Nepal that covers the alpinist adventurers and those who support them, villagers and their world view, multiple views of the ever shifting landscape, and more. I feel like I've been to Nepal.
This seems like the perfect introductory book to Nepal. I loved it.
A beautiful, horrific, and informative collection of stories about Nepal that covers the alpinist adventurers and those who support them, villagers and their world view, multiple views of the ever shifting landscape, and more. I feel like I've been to Nepal.
This seems like the perfect introductory book to Nepal. I loved it.
March 19, 2020
This collection has some serious ups and downs, so it averages around 3 stars for me. Each chapter is taken from a different book and author, so you can read excerpts from dozens of people who had an experience in Nepal. I was introduced to the author Dervla Murphy, a tough lady from Ireland who cycled through Europe to Nepal and had a myriad of incredible world adventures in her life (including Cameroon with her young daughter!). I would love to read more of her, and I am grateful that "House of Snow" brought this incredible person to my attention.
There were chapters from surveyors 100 years ago who were trekking in the same valleys that I have been to (Langtang Valley) and so I read these parts, fascinated! I liked the chapter by Sir Edmund Hillary, the famous Everest climber, who went on to establish schools in very poor villages. His observations on Sherpas and Tamangs can border on the racist, but based on his interpretation of their culture and ways (they're lazy, they're dirty.... but sanitation there was lacking, true). There was a great chapter on the Royal Massacre of 2001 which broke down the Prince's actions step-by-step as he murdered his family. (I thought Dad might like to read about that.)
Other stories and poems were not as inspiring, not as well written, and not as informative. I'm glad I read it, seeing how much I love Nepal! Now I really will look for the complete books that were featured in this anthology.
There were chapters from surveyors 100 years ago who were trekking in the same valleys that I have been to (Langtang Valley) and so I read these parts, fascinated! I liked the chapter by Sir Edmund Hillary, the famous Everest climber, who went on to establish schools in very poor villages. His observations on Sherpas and Tamangs can border on the racist, but based on his interpretation of their culture and ways (they're lazy, they're dirty.... but sanitation there was lacking, true). There was a great chapter on the Royal Massacre of 2001 which broke down the Prince's actions step-by-step as he murdered his family. (I thought Dad might like to read about that.)
Other stories and poems were not as inspiring, not as well written, and not as informative. I'm glad I read it, seeing how much I love Nepal! Now I really will look for the complete books that were featured in this anthology.
May 28, 2025
See sai lõpuks läbi!!! Oli kokkuvõttes raske lugemine ja mõni osa kõnetas enam kui mõni teine, aga üldiselt olen ikkagi nii rahul, et ette võtsin! Ülevaade paljudest erinevatest Nepaaliga seotud mõtetest ja lugudest.
One woman was accompanied by her self-possessed five-year-old son who, feeling a bit peckish, had a long drink from his mother's breast - and then stood up, wiped his mouth, took a cigarette from the pocket of his tattered shift and strolled over to me to request a match. One hears that mothers should not smoke while breastfeeding their children: but apparently it is quite in order for Nepalese children to smoke while being breast-fed.
On a more mundane level the evening was scarcely less memorable, because we had potatoes and milk for supper. Perhaps only a compatriot could appreciate the gastronomic ecstasy into which an Irish woman can fall when served with potatoes after living on rice for a fortnight. Yet Mingmar seemed equally thrilled; though
he can eat rice in such abundance, potatoes are the staple food of the Sherpas in their home district. He successfully consumed thirty-three large specimens and was quite concerned when, after twelve monsters, I reluctantly declined a third helping for sheer lack of space.
These Sherpas certainly get around -and they seem to need no passport for all their travels between Tibet, Nepal and India. Of course, Lhamo now flies from Kathmandu to Calcutta, and for all I know travels by truck
in Tibet. She has two husbands, so far one who looks after the family farm near Namche Bazaar and one in Kathmandu, who also has another wife permanently resident there to comfort him while the tycoon Lhamo attends to her International Business. No wonder Sherpa relationships are not easy to sort out!
Over the course of not very many years,
Kathmandu has turned from a dozy, slightly ethereal town left over from a distant century into a warren of exhaust-choked, garbage-strewn streets and byways where thousands of shops tumble over one another, pouring out into the patchily paved lanes the cheap clothes, sweaters, and jewelry (almost none of it Nepali) bought by
bargain-hunting backpackers, the descendants of the hippies who once made this town the narcotics nirvana of the Eastern world. More than a million residents scramble for space in hives and warrens above stinking gutter-sewers which foster the spread of epidemic diseases; the warnings were out for cholera and encephalitis on my last visit. Low-budget tourists, charmed by small lodges where a few dollars will still buy room and board, succumb with increasing frequency to gut-wrenching maladies. Japanese tourists
and some international aid workers ride or pedal around wearing masks to filter the particle-heavy air. Oddly, a lot of us still love the place, though affection is tested a little more each year.
But by then the outside world had begun to arrive. At first, there were only a few diplomats and adventurers, but in the seventies the hippies hit town, drawn by the low cost of almost everything. Overland to Kathmandu became the pilgrimage route of the counterculture. They settled on a run-down street, rapidly nicknamed Freak Street, near the city's ancient temples, and cultivated a mind-altering ethic of drugs and mysticism. Thirty years later, the street is a jumble of cheap lodgings, drug dealers, and
tourist shops. Most of the founding freaks are long departed, although a few of them have gone into the trekking business. But
the door they pushed open admitted other foreigners - the tourists and the aid agencies, who challenged old habits by example and by design. The result is a bizarre reality, a dissonant collage of medieval traditions and the modern world.
Most of the royal family was unpopular, but about King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah the
bourgeoisie had always been addle-headed. He was such a pleasant fellow. Because he now did so little as a constitutional monarch, he committed few mistakes. Because he controlled so few public funds, he was not tainted by money. Because he spoke so little, what he said sounded sage. He shone in comparison to the coarse, bungling party leaders of the day.
"Lord Vishnu,"' her mother said, emphasizing every word, "is a nuisance. He reclines and rests on his snake and the snake swims all day on the ocean and your Lord Vishnu gets properly blue with pneumonia and stiff with rheumatism. Poor Lakshmi has no other job than to massage his legs day in and day out. If he stopped sleeping on a snake and started doing something more useful, it would be much better, no? Chronic pneumonia and severe rheumatism, that is all it is.
"I was speaking to the BBC on the telephone just the other day. They wanted to know if I had any new predictions." He flicked a hand towards the customers still waiting beyond the doorway. "But you see what my life is like. I have no time now for catastrophes and revolutions. Every minute is taken up with the flimflam of day-to-day."
A mandala is something like an icon, which channels the power of the god it depicts, and therefore something like a prayer or a spell. I
also read that each ancient city is a giant mandala, a diagram of the order of the universe, with the king's palace at the centre, surrounded at the margins by the temples of the Eight Mother Goddesses, by the twelve sacred bathing places and the eight cremation grounds.
One woman was accompanied by her self-possessed five-year-old son who, feeling a bit peckish, had a long drink from his mother's breast - and then stood up, wiped his mouth, took a cigarette from the pocket of his tattered shift and strolled over to me to request a match. One hears that mothers should not smoke while breastfeeding their children: but apparently it is quite in order for Nepalese children to smoke while being breast-fed.
On a more mundane level the evening was scarcely less memorable, because we had potatoes and milk for supper. Perhaps only a compatriot could appreciate the gastronomic ecstasy into which an Irish woman can fall when served with potatoes after living on rice for a fortnight. Yet Mingmar seemed equally thrilled; though
he can eat rice in such abundance, potatoes are the staple food of the Sherpas in their home district. He successfully consumed thirty-three large specimens and was quite concerned when, after twelve monsters, I reluctantly declined a third helping for sheer lack of space.
These Sherpas certainly get around -and they seem to need no passport for all their travels between Tibet, Nepal and India. Of course, Lhamo now flies from Kathmandu to Calcutta, and for all I know travels by truck
in Tibet. She has two husbands, so far one who looks after the family farm near Namche Bazaar and one in Kathmandu, who also has another wife permanently resident there to comfort him while the tycoon Lhamo attends to her International Business. No wonder Sherpa relationships are not easy to sort out!
Over the course of not very many years,
Kathmandu has turned from a dozy, slightly ethereal town left over from a distant century into a warren of exhaust-choked, garbage-strewn streets and byways where thousands of shops tumble over one another, pouring out into the patchily paved lanes the cheap clothes, sweaters, and jewelry (almost none of it Nepali) bought by
bargain-hunting backpackers, the descendants of the hippies who once made this town the narcotics nirvana of the Eastern world. More than a million residents scramble for space in hives and warrens above stinking gutter-sewers which foster the spread of epidemic diseases; the warnings were out for cholera and encephalitis on my last visit. Low-budget tourists, charmed by small lodges where a few dollars will still buy room and board, succumb with increasing frequency to gut-wrenching maladies. Japanese tourists
and some international aid workers ride or pedal around wearing masks to filter the particle-heavy air. Oddly, a lot of us still love the place, though affection is tested a little more each year.
But by then the outside world had begun to arrive. At first, there were only a few diplomats and adventurers, but in the seventies the hippies hit town, drawn by the low cost of almost everything. Overland to Kathmandu became the pilgrimage route of the counterculture. They settled on a run-down street, rapidly nicknamed Freak Street, near the city's ancient temples, and cultivated a mind-altering ethic of drugs and mysticism. Thirty years later, the street is a jumble of cheap lodgings, drug dealers, and
tourist shops. Most of the founding freaks are long departed, although a few of them have gone into the trekking business. But
the door they pushed open admitted other foreigners - the tourists and the aid agencies, who challenged old habits by example and by design. The result is a bizarre reality, a dissonant collage of medieval traditions and the modern world.
Most of the royal family was unpopular, but about King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah the
bourgeoisie had always been addle-headed. He was such a pleasant fellow. Because he now did so little as a constitutional monarch, he committed few mistakes. Because he controlled so few public funds, he was not tainted by money. Because he spoke so little, what he said sounded sage. He shone in comparison to the coarse, bungling party leaders of the day.
"Lord Vishnu,"' her mother said, emphasizing every word, "is a nuisance. He reclines and rests on his snake and the snake swims all day on the ocean and your Lord Vishnu gets properly blue with pneumonia and stiff with rheumatism. Poor Lakshmi has no other job than to massage his legs day in and day out. If he stopped sleeping on a snake and started doing something more useful, it would be much better, no? Chronic pneumonia and severe rheumatism, that is all it is.
"I was speaking to the BBC on the telephone just the other day. They wanted to know if I had any new predictions." He flicked a hand towards the customers still waiting beyond the doorway. "But you see what my life is like. I have no time now for catastrophes and revolutions. Every minute is taken up with the flimflam of day-to-day."
A mandala is something like an icon, which channels the power of the god it depicts, and therefore something like a prayer or a spell. I
also read that each ancient city is a giant mandala, a diagram of the order of the universe, with the king's palace at the centre, surrounded at the margins by the temples of the Eight Mother Goddesses, by the twelve sacred bathing places and the eight cremation grounds.
February 17, 2024
The first anthology I’ve read and what a wonderful way to discover new writers. I enjoyed some excerpts more than others, but learned so much about the culture, history, landscape, and political background of Nepal, from native and foreign authors and from every genre of writing. I will definitely be reading more of some authors introduced to me here.
November 3, 2016
This is a large collection of fiction and nonfiction either about Nepal or written by authors from Nepal. The selections range from historical essay and travelogue to poetry and short stories. There's quite a lot of material here and anyone interested in the topic should find something worthwhile.
Some of the selections are better than others, of course. The historical sections (one report of the 2015 earthquake recovery efforts notwithstanding) generally look back at least a few decades, providing readers with a glimpse into modern Nepal. The fiction tends towards the literary in nature, and is generally pretty good, if sometimes a bit aimless.
There are some minor organizational issues: I think that the historical essays would benefit from some introductory text to place them in context for a reader unaware of, say, the Maoist movement in Nepal. As it is, the excerpts tend to plunge you directly into a certain historical or political situation without much in the way of background. I also would have liked publication dates for each of the selections, which would help the reader process the more colonial attitudes of some of the writers, especially in the beginning of the collection.
I appreciated that this collection included multiple accounts of the 2001 royal family massacre to help get some perspective on this bizarre, poorly-understood tragedy.
As for the fiction here, I could have used further clarification as to whether passages represented a short story or an excerpt from a novel (which would probably explain some of the aimless quality I mentioned above; I suspect some of these are but chapters in a larger story). The short biographies of each author sort of address this, but not fully.
All in all, this took a while to read, but it was time well spent. As someone who is very interested in travelling in this part of the world, I think it provides a useful background.
Thanks to the publisher, Trafalgar Square Publishing/Head of Zeus, for providing a review copy through Netgalley.com.
Some of the selections are better than others, of course. The historical sections (one report of the 2015 earthquake recovery efforts notwithstanding) generally look back at least a few decades, providing readers with a glimpse into modern Nepal. The fiction tends towards the literary in nature, and is generally pretty good, if sometimes a bit aimless.
There are some minor organizational issues: I think that the historical essays would benefit from some introductory text to place them in context for a reader unaware of, say, the Maoist movement in Nepal. As it is, the excerpts tend to plunge you directly into a certain historical or political situation without much in the way of background. I also would have liked publication dates for each of the selections, which would help the reader process the more colonial attitudes of some of the writers, especially in the beginning of the collection.
I appreciated that this collection included multiple accounts of the 2001 royal family massacre to help get some perspective on this bizarre, poorly-understood tragedy.
As for the fiction here, I could have used further clarification as to whether passages represented a short story or an excerpt from a novel (which would probably explain some of the aimless quality I mentioned above; I suspect some of these are but chapters in a larger story). The short biographies of each author sort of address this, but not fully.
All in all, this took a while to read, but it was time well spent. As someone who is very interested in travelling in this part of the world, I think it provides a useful background.
Thanks to the publisher, Trafalgar Square Publishing/Head of Zeus, for providing a review copy through Netgalley.com.
December 6, 2017
A super collection of writings on Nepal. Some were honestly over my head, but I loved the peek into modern Nepal and historic/cultural context. Best for those about to go or just went (as I did) to Nepal and Newari / Kathmandu areas particularly. Such a magical land and people, brought to depth by its literature.
August 1, 2017
A bit of everything, including:
- excellent journalism ;
- superfluous stories of westerners;
- very good Nepali poetry;
- decent Nepali short stories;
- fiction of purely ethnographic value.
Be selective. Start with Isobel Hilton's must-read "Letter from Kathmandu".
- excellent journalism ;
- superfluous stories of westerners;
- very good Nepali poetry;
- decent Nepali short stories;
- fiction of purely ethnographic value.
Be selective. Start with Isobel Hilton's must-read "Letter from Kathmandu".
November 5, 2016
Read it for real insight into Nepal. Into its poetry, its literature, its politics and its people. Thank you Niranjan for sharing it with me.
October 28, 2018
An excellent read.
December 12, 2022
A must for anyone who loves Nepal. Inevitably with a collection this large, there are some pieces that I enjoyed more than others but overall it provided real insights into the country, with a mix of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. I particularly enjoyed the Nepali authors, as so much of what I previously knew was through western eyes.
Standout pieces for me were: Dukha during the World war, Trap, Forget Kathmandu, From Goddess to Mortal, Buddha's Orphans and Three Springs.
Standout pieces for me were: Dukha during the World war, Trap, Forget Kathmandu, From Goddess to Mortal, Buddha's Orphans and Three Springs.
January 6, 2024
Got to confess this whopper was dragged back to the library before I completed it... I feel like I read enough for a broad comprehension of Nepal, although wouldn't be adverse to picking it up for more at some date in the future!
It's a perfect compilation, really, a great mix of well-written material :)
It's a perfect compilation, really, a great mix of well-written material :)
December 14, 2021
House of Snow ** Read in Pokhara and Kathmandu, Nepal (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
July 30, 2021
A really interesting and eclectic anthology of writing on Nepal. Found myself a few new authors to chase up
August 14, 2022
Lots of sample short articles and stories.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews