Rating: 3.5* of fiveThe Publisher Says: 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.My Review: 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-nigh 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 work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Sacred Games.. the book should ideally be named as '6 Degrees of separation' or 'Chaos theory' or 'Butterfly effect' .. etc because everyone & every situation & every thing is related to each other.. starting a chain of events, growing bigger & bigger till the end.. when we realise that this ripple which was bound to lead to a tsunami actually led to a bubble.. well its an interesting read.. with many plots.. the religious animosity, gang war of mumbai dons, underbelly of mumbai slum life and underworld.. neuclear threats, india pakistan clash... etc etc.. mixed with snippets of bollywood, partition, intelligence bureau activities & plots, men sleeping with every other women, bar girls, blackmailing & extra marital affairs, informers, etc etc.. its like any typical bollywood movie only that the protagonist is a middle aged mature sikh policeman.. or was it the deadly dangerous, cunning but gullible hindu gangster.. who ever the hero.. it has a lady love, bunch of villains, friend of the heroes, a family, a threat looming large and saviour of the day our simple sardar ji... no heroic stuff just normal jugadoo types.. the most peculiar thing is that the author could manage to write in and attach each significant event in the Indian history since independence into the books and its characters.. like partition exodus, NEFA, maoists of west bengal, Nehru & his visions, 1993 bombay bomb blasts, sikh urgency of 80s in punjab, babri masjid. Most of the characters are also real life inspired like Daowood, chota rajan, Ms India wannabe actresses, maharashtra's legislative politicians.. so well repeated & re-repeated in every bollywood movie.. I read it like i would go for a movie.. but 900 pages of it and the same stuff... there was too much content put into 900.. author could have very well written 2000 pages with the same content but mercifully it was limited & concise.. so at a time when the book could hav been a predictable, drag read it still maganged to be racy & something or the other happening kept me hooked.So i would advise you to read it for the ample content & series of events like an Irving wallace or thriller novel minus any heroes but don't expect a book that would leave you asking for more. Its over and over for good. Its just a read..
What do You think about Sacred Games (2007)?
Creating a world is big job. Vikram chandra's bombay needed a big canvas. So the enormous sized book sacred games.I am writing this note because after finishing this book if i write it Will definitely lack some main points.For my own memory i am writing this.Sartaj singh.divorcee inspector .kamble and katekar his collegues. In a lengthy described way we come to know about their life and bombay. Ganesh gaitonde a don. sartaj receives information about him and surrounds his adda to capture him.after a lengthy monologue of Ganesh about how he entered underworld he kills himself. Sartaj has to find two questions.why Ganesh came to city and who is the woman with him. Next chapter after his death Ganesh talks about his career in underworld.How Ganesh gaitonde destroyes his enemies and raises to power.whole chapter is racy and mixture of art and violenceA chapter full of past life of sartaj's mother. She lost her sister.why she hates Muslims etc. Next chapter is about investigation of sartaj.pretty also family of katekar his life etc.Don Ganesh gaitonde wins a election but fails to fulfill a girls wish to marry a dalith boy . A war between him and suleman isa costs him lose a dear friend.he gets married because that's the last wish of his friendSartaj interrogates mary.sister of jojo who is died with don. She tells her husband and jojo had affair. A hunch goes wrong and katekar got killed.K.d. a raw person who is anjali mathur's mentor dying in the hospital bed. he had amnesia.a great game of fraud money is on.anjali mathur asks him why don in search of three Sadhus?There is search for nuclear weapons.there is naxalites.a woman harassed by her extra marital affair.and finally a good end.I liked it very much.because unlike his other two works its not confusing.A true master piece.
—Prashanth Kanichar
Really, really, really a good read. Pulled me in and kept me there despite its LOOONG length. It is almost a 1000 pages. But so well written. I love complex interwoven stories, stories from which other stories emerge. Despite not meeting characters for whole chapters, you recollect them easily. The portraits are quite nice but Bombay and its messy feelings run through the whole novel. It is replete with Bambaiya which one may understand using the glossary provided at the back of the book. Lotsa filmi references to Bollywood through songs and actors. My first Chandra read. Definitely going to pick up other books of his.Made me really sad to think that Navneet survived but was never reunited with her family despite longing for them till the end of her life and being longed for by her baby sister, Nikki. What an ironical but fitting portrayal of the absurdities of ingrained prejudices & hatred that religious differences spout even as they draw upon tenuous and imagined histories. The Guru's nuclear weapon was the least strong part of the story. Loved it.
—Radhika
Well, what a little hypocrite I am ... because politically, this book has so much wrong with it on so many levels. So don't rush out and read it and then denounce me, and you know who I'm talking to. But. Still. What a story. What writing. What a great read. In its scope and thrust and breadth -- it is at once a detective story, a character study or rather series of character studies, a sweeping meditation on the post-colonial history of India and in particular the national question (I found one of the subplots, having to do with the ravages of the Partition, just devastating, it left me weak and weeping), a fascinating portrait of a great city -- this is a masterful novel. Tolstoyan, I'd say (now that I'm such a big Tolstoy expert having finally read War & Peace recently). This was a rare reading experience: a nearly 1,000-page book that I wished would go on and on.
—Shelley Ettinger
