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Now a Netflix original series "SACRED GAMES [is] as hard to put down as it is to pick up." -- New York Times Book Review "Bold, fresh and big...SACRED GAMES deserves praise for its ambitions but also for its terrific achievement" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air. Seven years in the making, Sacred Games is an epic of exceptional richness and power. Vikram Chandra's novel draws the reader deep into the life of Inspector Sartaj Singh--and into the criminal underworld of Ganesh Gaitonde, the most wanted gangster in India. Sartaj, one of the very few Sikhs on the Mumbai police force, is used to being identified by his turban, beard and the sharp cut of his trousers. But "the silky Sikh" is now past forty, his marriage is over and his career prospects are on the slide. When Sartaj gets an anonymous tip-off as to the secret hide-out of the legendary boss of G-Company, he's determined that he'll be the one to collect the prize. Vikram Chandra's keenly anticipated new novel is a magnificent story of friendship and betrayal, of terrible violence, of an astonishing modern city and its dark side. Drawing inspiration from the classics of nineteenth-century fiction, mystery novels, Bollywood movies and Chandra's own life and research on the streets of Mumbai, Sacred Games evokes with devastating realism the way we live now but resonates with the intelligence and emotional depth of the best of literature.… (more)
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It's also fabuolously, gorgeously wrought, and very much worthy of being a bestseller. It never will be, for several reasons.
First: It has, and needs, a
Okay, first comes the glossary. Honestly, I don't know what to tell you about this. I think, based on personal experience, that it's best simply to immerse yourself in the sea of the book, experiencing it the way you would Mumbai if you went there without a tour guide. Just wander along behind Vikram, looking over his shoulder and listening to the people he's talking to; he's the author, after all, and we should trust him to lead us not into the temptation to give up, but deliver us to a satisfying conclusion to the stories he's telling us. He won't disappoint. But if you constantly flip back and forth, back and forth, to the glossary, it'll get wearing and make that giving-up option well-igh irresistable. Just let the language happen, let yourself see the words without having an instant picture of the concrete reality but rather absorbing the ideas behind them. "Chodo" doesn't need to mean something explicit to you for you to realize that it's being used to describe physical intimacy. You'll get that point PDQ. Let it happen naturally! Try to move past your ingrained logic-and-analysis patterns to experience something afresh.
Second, there are a LOT of people in this tale, and a more complete league table of them would have been helpful where a glossary was not especially so. I think it's useful, in books of more than 20 characters, for publishers to offer us the chance to refresh our memories about who's who and what role and relationship they have in the book. I'd make the publisher do this retroactively but that's not practical...Harper Collins isn't taking orders from me, for some strange reason.
Third, the immensity of the tome! Gadzooks and Godzilla! Had this book sold in the millions, Canada would be devoid of tree-cover. 928pp!! Now, having read the book twice, I can honestly and objectively say that at least 150pp could have come out and left the beauties of the book intact. I think it's a common problem among publishers, though, this inability, or unwillingness, or inexpertise at the art of good editing. I know it's hard. I know because I've done it, and done it very well. But I also know that the end product of a good, collaborative edit is a fabulously improved book.
Fourth, Vikram Chandra's fractured PoV for storytelling. This is the reason an organized Cast of Characters is needed...who's who is provided on p. xi-xii, but it's not complete, and it's not broken into groups by relationship. But the voices are, for third person-limited narrative, beautifully differentiated. The "Inset:" tags are clues to the changes of viewpoint, but we never leave the third person-limited narrative voice; it's challenging to make that not seem flat, like the PoV character suddenly knows things he can't possibly have access to; and for the most part, Vikram Chandra does it well. The last "Inset: Two Deaths, in Cities Far From Home" isn't quite as smooth as others, and in my never-very-humble opinion could be dispensed with whole and entire without damage to the rest of the story.
So why am I so mingy in giving this book a mere 3.5 stars? Because it's too big a commitment to ask a reader to make when it could have been shorter and better told. But folks, India is a huge, huge, huge place that has a lot of English speakers in it. They're going to be producing more and more books in English. I really, strongly advise you to start acclimatizing yourselves to this new reality by picking up works by talented storytellers like Vikram Chandra. Start here, start learning to let Hindi words reveal themselves to you, sink back into the immense, soft seas of India's talented storytellers...unless you want to learn Mandarin, that is.WOW. What a book! It's over 900pp long! It's as overwhelming and complex and befuddling as Bharat itself is, for an uninitiated Murrikin tourist.
It's also fabuolously, gorgeously wrought, and very much worthy of being a bestseller. It never will be, for several reasons.
First: It has, and needs, a glossary. Second, it needs but has not an organized-by-relationship Cast of Characters. Third, it's a blinkin' wrist-sprainer of a hardcover and would be fatter than the Bible if it was turned into a mass-market paperback. Fourth, it's just as challengingly fragmented as Ulysses, only more fun to read.
Okay, first comes the glossary. Honestly, I don't know what to tell you about this. I think, based on personal experience, that it's best simply to immerse yourself in the sea of the book, experiencing it the way you would Mumbai if you went there without a tour guide. Just wander along behind Vikram, looking over his shoulder and listening to the people he's talking to; he's the author, after all, and we should trust him to lead us not into the temptation to give up, but deliver us to a satisfying conclusion to the stories he's telling us. He won't disappoint. But if you constantly flip back and forth, back and forth, to the glossary, it'll get wearing and make that giving-up option well-igh irresistable. Just let the language happen, let yourself see the words without having an instant picture of the concrete reality but rather absorbing the ideas behind them. "Chodo" doesn't need to mean something explicit to you for you to realize that it's being used to describe physical intimacy. You'll get that point PDQ. Let it happen naturally! Try to move past your ingrained logic-and-analysis patterns to experience something afresh.
Second, there are a LOT of people in this tale, and a more complete league table of them would have been helpful where a glossary was not especially so. I think it's useful, in books of more than 20 characters, for publishers to offer us the chance to refresh our memories about who's who and what role and relationship they have in the book. I'd make the publisher do this retroactively but that's not practical...Harper Collins isn't taking orders from me, for some strange reason.
Third, the immensity of the tome! Gadzooks and Godzilla! Had this book sold in the millions, Canada would be devoid of tree-cover. 928pp!! Now, having read the book twice, I can honestly and objectively say that at least 150pp could have come out and left the beauties of the book intact. I think it's a common problem among publishers, though, this inability, or unwillingness, or inexpertise at the art of good editing. I know it's hard. I know because I've done it, and done it very well. But I also know that the end product of a good, collaborative edit is a fabulously improved book.
Fourth, Vikram Chandra's fractured PoV for storytelling. This is the reason an organized Cast of Characters is needed...who's who is provided on p. xi-xii, but it's not complete, and it's not broken into groups by relationship. But the voices are, for third person-limited narrative, beautifully differentiated. The "Inset:" tags are clues to the changes of viewpoint, but we never leave the third person-limited narrative voice; it's challenging to make that not seem flat, like the PoV character suddenly knows things he can't possibly have access to; and for the most part, Vikram Chandra does it well. The last "Inset: Two Deaths, in Cities Far From Home" isn't quite as smooth as others, and in my never-very-humble opinion could be dispensed with whole and entire without damage to the rest of the story.
So why am I so mingy in giving this book a mere 3.5 stars? Because it's too big a commitment to ask a reader to make when it could have been shorter and better told. But folks, India is a huge, huge, huge place that has a lot of English speakers in it. They're going to be producing more and more books in English. I really, strongly advise you to start acclimatizing yourselves to this new reality by picking up works by talented storytellers like Vikram Chandra. Start here, start learning to let Hindi words reveal themselves to you, sink back into the immense, soft seas of India's talented storytellers...unless you want to learn Mandarin, that is.
This question is central to the plot of this very good police procedural. Two protagonists are driven to find the answer: Sartaj Singh, an divorced inspector with the Mumbai police department, and Gaitonde
While true to its genre, Sacred Games is much more than a police procedural. The story could not have taken place outside of Mumbai; indeed, at one time or another, all the major characters talk about their love or need for this sprawling, dirty, polluted, completely corrupt city. The book abounds with descriptions of neighborhoods, important buildings, stores, restaurants, street vendors, and everything else that makes up the vital life of this city.
The same is true for the people as well; we meet them from every walk of life, from the beggars through the lowest criminal through socialites, businessmen--and film stars. What Chandra shows is the (to me) truly astonishing obsession Indians have with films, from the songs to the actors and actresses who star in them, and who occupy the fantasies of those in every stratum of Indian life. Bollywood and its culture play a major role in the story.
The book is structured in an interesting way: third person narrative of Sartaj Singh’s role with first-person narrative by Gaitonde. From time to time, Chandra inserts other related material in just that way: chapters he calls inserts.
I enjoyed the story and found the abundant information about Mumbai fascinating. Chandra liberally uses Hindi and other vocabulary, particularly street slang, throughout the book; while there’s a glossary in the back, it’s nowhere near adequate. Plus, this is a long, long book, 947 pages, and after a while, the need to check constantly with the glossary becomes annoying, especially when the word you’re looking for isn’t there. The length seems necessary given Chandra’s goals, but the book does tend to bog down in the middle. What keeps up the interest, though, is Gaitonde, who is a great character. Even while other parts lag, Gaitonde is always fascinating, as we learn about his life through his eyes, his intriguing spiritual quest, and his descent into his own particular hell. Without Gaitonde, the book would be mediocre, no matter how much detail of Mumbai life Chandra crams into the story.
If you are interested in indian life, and want to read more abut the way Indians look at Bollywood, then this is a good book; the police procedural part is nicely nested within all that information. But it is not a book I would recommend on either its literary or entertainment merits.
One of the reasons that it's so hard to describe this book is because there is just so much of everything. The characters, situations and atmosphere are literally packed into this huge tome. It would be easy to say that this was a great book and leave it at that, but the thought and patience that must have gone into the creation of this brimming story leave me to marvel. Every instance of action is held to it's fullest potential, which kept me tense as I sprung from page to page. Threads of story disappeared completely, only to be deftly introduced again just when I thought they had dissipated. The author never let up on his hold over the story, keeping a myriad of confusions and labyrinth of details all in check. Every character, no matter their importance in the story, had a piece in the greater puzzle, and it was exciting to watch the drama creep from unforeseen corners out onto the main stage to thunder back into the spotlight. There were no messy segues and bits of plot left over in this story: everything was expertly tucked in, leaving no niggling questions to sort out other than the obvious moral conundrums that the story itself creates. One of the great things about this book was the way that each character was fully rounded and three-dimensional. Yes, there were some stock characters, but I would say that about 95% of the characters were shown in a way that highlighted their importance to the plot, while still fleshing them out completely. And despite the fact that Gaitonde was a villain, he came across as uniquely humble and beneficent while still managing to be an altogether bad apple. I also fell in love with the character of Sartaj Singh, just a little bit. His formalities, prudence and humility were very touching, lending him the air of an upright yet fallible gentleman. In a brilliant yet understated way, the country of India was not only the backdrop for this story, it became a character in itself. The effect was a clever installation of place, but it also lent a depth to the India I was familiar with and exposited for me whole new avenues of imagination. The book did have some violence running through the plot, but it was by no means gratuitous or off-putting. In this instance, I would say the author hit the perfect balance with his use of violence: not too gory, yet not too tame. I couldn't help but feel involved with this book, as it presented an India that few ever see: a teeming and colorful world that I feasted upon with relish.
This is, however, an extremely long book, and requires a certain level of commitment from the reader. The only problem I had with this book was the fact that I had to lug it around. To remedy this, I suggest that you may feel more comfortable with the paperback version. I should also mention that the book includes a glossary of the Indian slang that is peppered throughout the book. I found the glossary to be extremely helpful. This book had it all in terms of its pace, scope and subject matter, and gave me so much more to wonder about an area of the world that I already find fascinating. If you have the time to invest in this book, and have a love for Indian fiction, you can't go wrong with Sacred Games.
Interleaved in Sartaj’s daily muddling through, Ganesh Gaitonde, a major Mumbai crime-boss tells us his venal life story. Although some of his history is fascinating, this is the least attractive part of Sacred Games. I was uncomfortable with this narrative for a number of reasons. Firstly because Gaitonde dies in the first hundred pages and I saw no literary justification for this life-story narrated in the first-person. Secondly, because his self-justification began eventually to jar on me. Thirdly, because the key plot leading to his downfall smacked a little too much of a Stephen Siegal thriller with nuclear bombs and last minute rescues. Nevertheless, Gaitonde’s story had its merits; it’s witty, frequently original and it introduces Jojo, the woman who refuses to meet him but who provides him with girls. The foul-mouthed, corrupt Jojo is one of this novels fantastic originals. It is through her that we get to explore aspects of Bollywood and the depths the ambitious and unconnected must stoop to in order to succeed.
More than anything else, what I really loved about Sacred Games was its principle character, India. I knew nothing about India before I picked up this book and it has mesmerised me. Flashbacks take us back fifty years to Partition when India and Pakistan went their separate ways and tens of millions of people were displaced. We get insights into a state which is simultaneously modern and feudal. The book is steeped in politics and religion. We are treated to many brief but fully fleshed-out biographies of people from all strata of society, loosely connected to the main storyline, but fascinating for themselves. This is a novel we want to enter and get involved with its very real inhabitants. I continuously wanted to intervene, to use my privileged insider-knowledge of all their stories to correct the accidents of history, set them straight and help them out.
Some reviewers have criticised the Insets, chapters which recount stories outside the main thread of the narrative, as distracting to the reader. Personally, I found that these were the elements that elevated the book beyond good to GREAT. The author uses these tales to underline that none of the characters ever knows the whole story. In this way, the reader has a perspective that the characters miss. We see, for example, mitigating circumstances in the life of the cop killer. I particularly liked the story of the two sisters, separated by the Partition, who end up living long and rewarding lives in opposite camps.
I can’t remember when I was so ‘involved’ in a story. This is the book that will bring me eventually to visit India.
I can't deny that this is a well written book. I won't even say that there are too many characters, but I will say that this book, as well written and fascinating as it is, goes on way, way too long. Although I can see why he added every scene, they all illuminate the great variety and contradictions of India, I still think that if this book had been half as long, it would have been tighter and simply more readable. As it is, I picked it up and put it down many times. When you are reading page 400 and realize that you are less than half the way through, there is a great need to read something else, anything else. If he had just stuck to the main characters, I would have been very interested in another book with all the little vignettes of life in India as a series of short stories. But now I feel I have probably read everything he has had to say about life in India, even if he writes another dozen volumes.
The plot, briefly: Sartaj Singh, a simple unassuming police inspector (our hero) crosses paths with Ganesh Gaitonde (also our hero), notorious Mumbai don, dead in his nuclear bunker by his own hand, with a young woman dead beside him. The authorities from Delhi find counterfeit money in the bunker, and poor inconsequential Sartaj is launched on a quest to get to the bottom of all this. Along the way he encounters rumours of a mad Swami, mysterious intelligence officials, actress-whores and corrupt politicians and ordinary murderers and adulterous airhostesses and, of course, unexpected love.
If you have watched the Bollywood movie 'Company' from a few years ago, this book will begin where that movie left off, and goes deeper into the psyche of the Mumbai underworld than almost everyone would like to pretend they are comfortable with (unless, of course, you have read "Shantaram").
A word of warning: you really have to have grown up in North India to properly understand the language and the characters (Chandra draws richly on Bollywood and Indian soap opera tradition). The glossary helps, but as one reviewer pointed out, switching back and forth is a bit tedious. Non-Indians are advised to either take in the novel without attempting to understand the Bombay slang words (they really aren't all that essential to understanding the text), read Suketu Mehta's "Maximum City" first, or watch a lot of Bollywood movies before attempting to read this book. There are, unfortunately, no shortcuts to cultural understanding.
It's the story of two people -- Sardaj Singh, a police detective, and Ganesh Gaitonde, a bigwig in an Indian mafia-style gang. The book begins with Gaitonde being apprehended via an anonymous phone call, so there's no chase or hunt involved. Except that there are unanswered questions once he's been found.
So the book is made up of alternating chapters -- Gaitonde's life history in the first person and Singh's current life in the third person. And there are four "insets," in which one or more other people are examined closely -- a turning point in the life of Singh's mother (during Partition), the last days of an intelligence officer who "ran" Gaitonde for years, etc. And, surprisingly, these insets not only don't disrupt the narrative, they also add texture and depth to the main story. I really really enjoyed them.
This is actually the first time I've been a little unimpressed with one of his recommended reads to be honest and that's quite a doozy considering that this book clocks in at about 950 pages. It does have a huge strength of helping me learning a little more about India and Chandra is coming from a much different sort of perspective than a few of the others I've read-Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Indra Sinha. Basically, I can see this being a commonly read household type of novel because of the very accessible writing style but at the same time, I found it a little confined and stifling. It doesn't flow very well for me and there isn't enough of an insight into humanity. He's a great story teller in the way he crafts through all of these different characters across time who are involved in every level of society from gangsters to police detectives to gurus. There's a fantastic complexity explored in terms of politics and religion. Again, it was mainly the writing style itself I disliked and the lack of the sense of lyric nature. If this had been a book that was even 400 pages in length, I wouldn't have felt so upset about that but it takes quite a time investment to read 1,000 pages...I'd rather love every minute.
Again, I'll note that this is a stylistic thing that others may look past easily to learn and love such an epic sort of story.
This book should be read in conjunction with Suketu Mehta's excellent Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which while a biography of the city and hence assumed to be a reasonably accurate account, has surprising parallels with the apparently fictional story of Sacred Games.
It's hard for me to condense this book into a paragraph or two but I'll give it a try. The main story involves a policeman in Mumbai, one Sartaj Singh. His father was also a policeman but he has been dead for some time. His mother, who was born in the Punjab which became part of Pakistan after Partition, was still alive but lived outside of Mumbai in a small hill town. As would be obvious to anyone from the Indian subcontinent Sartaj Singh is a Sikh. He is divorced so he spends most of his waking hours working. One day he gets a phone call in the early morning telling him where he can find the notorious crime boss Ganesh Gaitonde. This is quite a coup because Gaitonde was thought to be in hiding outside of India. Gaitonde is living in an almost indestructible underground bunker and before Sartaj manages to break down the upper structure he talks at some length to Sartaj. As Sartaj breaks in Gaitonde shoots himself; there is also the body of a woman in the bunker with him. Before Sartaj can really do a proper investigation the case is taken over by members of the Indian spy agency. However, Sartaj is asked to do some work on the case and doing so he discovers that the dead woman was JoJo Mascarenas, a television producer and agent for actors and actresses. This brings him into contact with JoJo's sister, Mary, with whom he falls in love. He also helps uncover a plot by the Pakistani government to flood the Indian economy with fake money and another plot by a religious zealot to explode a nuclear device in Mumbai. Sartaj also has more mundane duties like intervening in a marital dispute and picking up bribes for his superior officer. Sartaj is not a perfect person but the reader can't help but like him.
The main plot is interspersed with other narrative threads with one very significant exploration of Ganesh Gaitonde's life which his spirit narrates after his corporeal death. This is a look at the dark underbelly of Mumbai and beyond and it should have been highly distasteful but was somehow fascinating (sort of like looking at a traffic accident as you drive by). There was also a thread about how the Indian Partition affected Sartaj's mother and her family which was heartbreaking.
There are characters from all the different religions in India which I found particularly interesting. Chandra shows everyone as having good and bad qualities just as real people do. One comes away from reading this book with an admiration for how well the Indian society works despite all the different beliefs.