I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PRIMUS-They Can’t All Be Zingers (2006).

Such a great name for a greatest hits album. I’m delighted to know that Primus is still fun after all these years. How on earth they were every popular is simply beyond my comprehension.

[READ: May 2007] Sacred Games.

Here’s a link to Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games blog.

Whew, I thought this day would never come, but I finished Sacred Games, and what a trip it was! These characters will stick with me for a pretty long time. My major gripe, such as it is, is that I finished all but the last two chapters for my previous post, which left about 60 pages. The major climaxes were tied up, and I couldn’t imagine what else he would write about in those last pages. Strangely enough, he included what amounted to two short stories about characters not appearing elsewhere in the book (at least that I could remember). It was very anticlimactic, even if these two stories were interesting. Thankfully the last chapter brought some resolution to the overall story, which was nice to tie up loose ends.

Overall, the book was really fun, and I felt like I really got a feel for Indian culture. I currently work with three women from India, which has nothing really to do with anything, except that I was able to pick their brains a little bit and see if the story rang true for them (although I didn’t ask them about the gangsters and the swearing). It’s always fun to read about a culture I know very little about. But I always wind up with the same frustrations: how do I SAY those words, and, what nuances am I missing. The Glossary has been very helpful, I only wish I had discovered it 800 pages earlier!

But let’s talk about the book. The story focuses on two main characters, our hero Sartaj and the villain Gaitonde. Sartaj is a beat cop in Bombay. Through a fascinating series of convergences, mostly detailed in the story of Gaitonde, he and the super-gangster Gaitonde become spiritually locked in what may, in fact, be an attempt to stop an attempt to destroy all of India (nuclear terrorism, naturally).

The story of Gaitonde is very fleshed out, showing his rise to fame in gangland, and his eventual spiritual growth…the idea that his guru, and, by extension, other Indian gurus essentially turned a blind eye to the horrors that the gangsters commit is a wonderfully twisted and intriguing prospect. This idea was somewhat fleshed out in The Sopranos (with Carmela being a devout Catholic married to a gangster), but the idea here that the guru actually endorses Gaitonde’s behavior (because it is his character and is his way of advancing his passions), seems so wrong that even Gaitonde himself is startled at the thought. While a sympathetic gangster is not a new idea, [MILD SPOILER]: the gangster giving himself up to a religious figure only to be ultimately lost by this figure, brings a new direction of sympathy to a man who has killed for his own benefit.

The story of Sartaj is, naturally, less thrilling, as his life is more grounded in reality. Nevertheless, the day to day events are well detailed and, if not always enjoyable, certainly believable. It is in these scenes mostly that I had a hard time with the Indian-ness of the book, as I couldn’t really get a picture of Sartaj, and it was fully 500 pages into the book before I realized he had a beard: something that would probably have been obvious right from the start to readers familiar with the culture.

There are some gruesome scenes; one in particular I’d like to never think about again, but it was thankfully brief, and a few other violent scenes which are pretty par for the course since American Psycho.
[UPDATE: September 11, 2007]. I will not be calling this book torture porn, even though the incident is a form of torture, because one act of torture does not torture porn make.

So, yes, Gaitonde will stay with me, maderchod will stay with me, as will bhenchod and countless other slang words that I will feel very comfortable saying in public, as long as my coworkers aren’t around.

[DIGRESSION]: How did I come to read this book, you may ask. Well, I was at ALA I guess two years ago, walking through the Harper Collins display, and, there was a big shiny book, so I naturally gravitated towards it. Sacred Games came in a very pretty gold slipcover, with three bullet holes in it and a note from the publishers talking about how lucky we were to be about to read this book. I put it aside for over a year, but I’m glad I finally read it. The only problem is that I left the book in my car with the window open, and it got saturated during a rainy evening! I don’t imagine it will fit into that pretty slip cover again. Boo!