Books

The Long and short of It

Two East Bay Authors Turn Out Modern Classics

    Oakland’s Daniel Alarcón dazzled readers with his first collection of short stories, War by Candlelight. In that roller-coaster ride, some of Alarcón’s most arresting images were found in the stories set in Lima, Peru, on a continent he revisits in his first novel, Lost City Radio.
    Although Alarcón’s locale is a South American country, this time he keeps it nameless, and in this instance, less is truly more. The lack of specificity gives Lost City Radio both a sense of timelessness and a sense of urgency. War has been raging, yes; thousands have gone missing, yes—but in the shadow of that war comes Lost City Radio, a radio show serving a country trying to forget that the war ever occurred.
    The voice of Lost City Radio is provided by a woman named Norma. Every Sunday, for an hour, she reads the names of the lost and talks to those seeking brothers and sisters separated by war. Norma herself hopes for the day when her own husband will return from the jungle, and as the novel opens, a boy appears in Norma’s radio station providing a tenuous link to her past.
    Alarcón’s novel deftly probes the mysteries of war and its effect on those trying to forget and on those who promise always to remember.
    Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón (Harper Collins 2007, 272 pp., $24.95)
   
    You have some authors, like Alarcón, who are able to weave incredible amounts of storytelling into relatively tight packages, and then you have Vikram Chandra. With his opulent Sacred Games, Chandra has taken the first step toward becoming this century’s Tolstoy, showing a zest for grand storytelling that his contemporaries are unwilling (or unable) to accomplish.
    It’s difficult for any author to keep the interest of a reader for more than 900 pages, but Chandra accomplishes the task by embarking on an epic. The journey begins with a handy two-page list of the novel’s “Dramatis Personae,” which is quite helpful since it’s nearly impossible to keep track of all the players in a book of this length without a scorecard. And where does the novelist place a story of this scope? In the world’s most populated city, of course—Mumbai, India.
    At the core of Sacred Games is a battle between the criminal ruler of the city—a sort of Professor Moriarty for the Subcontinent—and a Sikh police inspector charged with bringing him down. John LeCarré—with George Smiley hunting his nemesis Karla—needed three novels to provide the scope of confrontation that Chandra delivers in one. And it is Chandra’s brilliance, and deftness, that allows him to recall such figures as diverse as Holmes and Smiley, but it’s his skill as a novelist that will have readers thinking of Dickens and Dostoyevsky.
    Like Alarcón, Chandra has ties to the Bay Area—he teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. His students might want to forgo reading Sacred Games until after they take his class—it might prove daunting for a student to know just how proficient their instructor is in the craft of writing. The rest of us, however, can sit back and enjoy two writers at the top of their games.
    Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (Harper Collins 2007, 912 pp., $29.95).