Sacred Games , livre ebook
591
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English
Ebooks
2008
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591
pages
English
Ebook
2008
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Publié par
Date de parution
14 mai 2008
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9789351180203
Langue
English
Publié par
Date de parution
14 mai 2008
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9789351180203
Langue
English
VIKRAM CHANDRA
Sacred Games
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Dedication
Dramatis Personae
Policeman s Day
Siege in Kailashpada
Ganesh Gaitonde Sells His Gold
Going Towards Home
Ganesh Gaitonde Acquires Land
Investigating Women
INSET : A House in a Distant City
Burying the Dead
Ganesh Gaitonde Wins an Election
Old Pain
INSET : The Great Game
Money
Ganesh Gaitonde is Recruited
A Woman in Distress
Ganesh Gaitonde is Recruited Again
Meeting Beauty
Ganesh Gaitonde Explores the Self
Investigating Love
Ganesh Gaitonde Makes a Film
INSET : Five Fragments, Scattered in Time
Ganesh Gaitonde Remakes Himself
The End of the World
Ganesh Gaitonde Goes Home
Safety
INSET : Two Deaths, in Cities Far From Home
Mere Sahiba
Acknowledgements
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS SACRED GAMES
Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize. His first collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region) and was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. Vikram currently divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, where he lives with his wife, Melanie, and teaches at the University of California. His work has been translated into eleven languages.
See www.vikramchandra.com
Critical Acclaim for Sacred Games
Vikram Chandra s Sacred Games wins the Hutch Crossword prize for English Fiction because in a crowded field filled with really first rate writing, the jury unanimously felt it was the outstanding novel of this year. -Anita Roy, Mukul Kesavan, Shoma Chaudhury (judges, 2006 Crossword Book Award for Fiction)
This is a ravishing, over-exuberant stab at the Great Indian Novel, an extraordinary work of fiction that will reward you in full for your investment of time...There s a superabundance of tumultuous narrative, acres of magnificent prose, and maybe a dozen too many characters. Yet these unruly parts ultimately fit together into a chaotic and luminous whole, one that mirrors Chandra s capacious vision of his homeland. -Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly (USA)
This is a moment worth marking. It s a landmark in the history of Indian English literature. Decades from now, we ll be looking back at the roster of great contemporary novels, and the title Sacred Games will trip off our tongues blithely and reverentially...Then there s the setting. Bombay. It s more than a setting. It s the book itself. Chandra brings it brilliantly, deeply alive-in all her foulness, filth and stained beauty...This is a great novel, perhaps the greatest book on Bombay ever written. -Ashok Banker, Hindustan Times
All human life is here was the old newspaper boast, and so it is in Sacred Games , delineated with a master s grandeur and scope and a miniaturist s precision and tenderness. Seven years it took Chandra to write, and such is the haunting precision of its observation and the resonant authority of its narrative voice that one could read it seven times over and still be finding new treasures; missed flourishes of virtuosity. One uses the terms epic and classic with caution. But if eloquence, confidence, humanity, grace and fine observation are their raw materials, perhaps Sacred Games deserves those epithets. -Jane Shilling, The Daily Telegraph (UK)
It may have taken him three books, but Sacred Games is where Chandra really finds humour through his mastery of irony. This is a brutal and passionate tale, always, but Chandra throughout tempts you to seek meaning above and below the narrative, to smile with pleased recognition...Best of all, he effortlessly draws the reader into a tale that actually isn t particularly straightforward at all. The story line is determinedly non-linear, the structure episodically jump-cut, very evocative of Donald Barthelme. That master of spare prose might have taken 380 pages to write a comparable tale, but that s not the point. Don de Lillo might have needed 1,500, and in neither case would these two literary giants have written this gargantuan tale of Bombay/Mumbai and all its little Indias in quite the same heartbreaking, sardonic, funny and violent way...Buy this Rabelaisian masterpiece of mordant homage to Bombay today. Vikram Chandra has set the benchmark for the Bombay novel very high indeed. -Hari Menon, Tehelka
Like a sculptor making small, delicate chips in stone, Chandra moves things along at a measured pace, building his characters, finding glorious little details in the minutiae of everyday Bombay life, yet remaining sharply focused on the main thrust of his detective story... Sacred Games quakes with seismic historical shocks, as if Chandra were intent on blasting open India s historically amnesiac present, a time when India (or at least its media and its political class) is intoxicated by its glorious future. Chandra telescopes the past through the present with a series of historical insets into the narrative, reminding readers, as if he were an adept in palmistry, that the shape of the future lies in the lines of the past... What we get here is an occult history worthy of Borges. The last hours of Gaitonde s life-his final dialogue with the murdered woman before their deaths, the last of a series of fabulous exchanges between them-are electrifying, a baroque distillation of all that has gone on before. Sacred Games s legacy might prove similar to that of Chandra s brother-in-law s film Parinda : By extending the territory of Indian literary fiction, it will allow others to tell crime stories of their own. Chandra s ultimate achievement is both as a genre novelist and as a novelist who uses genre elements. Solving the crime is important, but he also hands us the keys to the city and reveals its sordid mysteries. -Carl Bromley, The Nation (USA)
Vikram Chandra s masterly new novel-exactly 900 pages long-starts with a white Pomeranian, Fluffy, flying out of the window in upper-middle-class Mumbai...The spare, Hitchcockian funniness of the writing-the sense that it creates of schoolgoing ordinariness and urban kitsch erupting into bizarre and brutal catastrophe, and yet the ordinariness somehow managing to hold it all in eventually, in feats of epic-cinematic, divinely comic inclusiveness-is just one of the many ways in which Chandra s virtuosity unfolds in the novel...Yet, what holds the novel most profoundly and vitally together, and enables its mastery of the actual as well as the fabulous, the real and the surreal, is the cinema of Mumbai. Bollywood is to Sacred Games what chivalric romance is to Don Quixote-a living, self-perpetuating mythology, a shimmering universe of images and meanings by which people live and die, make, re-make and know (or resist knowing) themselves and the worlds and stories they inhabit. -Aveek Sen, The Telegraph
[Chandra] immerses the reader in a rich and utterly convincing world...A monumental portrait of interwoven lives that lingers with a reader long after the case is closed. -Thomas Wharton, The Globe and Mail (Canada)
For my money, this is the great Bombay book of the last decade. It gets the city s corrosive heat, the absolute knockdown democratic fever of it; and it goes some way to explaining why Bombay engenders loyalty among all those who live or have lived there...And one of the delights, for this reader at least, is the Bambaiyya Hindi, presented without italics, explanation, or apology: the apradhis, khabaris and pocket-maars, the bhais and boys, the gullels and ghodas...These are words that occur so often in Bombay they can be plucked out of the city s dirty air. But Chandra has done more. He uses them with such unerring gusto that they become celebratory, incantatory, not a code for insiders but something shared, like a song on the radio. -Jeet Thayil, Outlook
Sacred Games , though often suspenseful, is never filmi. Although the meat of this novel clings to the bones of a crime story, and there s certainly plenty of crime in it, the book is really a passionate tribute to contemporary India in all its vigor and vulgarity. Because it s not a family saga, it blessedly avoids what have become the clich s of the Indian literary novel. -Laura Miller, Salon.com (USA)
Chandra casts an enchanting and enthralling spell that documents two tales of two worlds-the Mumbai police and the Mumbai underworld. And garnishes it with many other tales...In doing so, he takes the enigma of Bombay to a new unparalleled high...This is a novelist at the height of his prowess almost sneering at all the academics who would no doubt try to construct and deconstruct this great Indian fable...Reportedly, Chandra took seven years to pen this epic masterpiece. The effort has well been worth it. For Sacred Games does the impossible. It makes an unwieldy hardcover unputdownable without missing a single literary beat. -Vijay Nair, Deccan Herald
Vikram Chandra s narrative is greater than a gangster story or a cinematic rendering of Indian life, or even an epic battle of good against evil...This is a work that can not only suck a reader in, but also turn an outlaw who should be thoroughly despicable into a heroic figure...The resulting web, intricate and large, comes together in the novel s startling, unexpected climax...[This is] a grand story that is carefully and passionately told. The final chapters, leading to the reason for Gaitonde s death, are breathtaking, as is Chandra s attention to the detail of character and circumstance. The work is so lovely, and so subtle, that it s well worth the cover price. -Robin Vidimos, The Denver Post (USA)
Sacred Games is storytelling at its very peak. Characters leap off the page to punch one in the gut, the narrative keeps the reader panting to know what happens next for every one of its 900 pages...If you ve been underwhelmed by recent writing from
