Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Chanakya's Chant: A Review.




Author:      Ashivin Sanghi
Publisher:  Westland Ltd.
Pages:        448
Price:         INR 250
Genre:       Historical-Thriller
Rating:       2.5/5

Ashivin Sanghi's best-seller Chanakya's Chant is two analogous stories with a lean thematic connection in one book. One story acquaints you with the historical Chanakya's legend and the other Chanakya's contemporary avatar, Gangasagar.


Though the book has an interesting concept and could have made an incredible read, but due to some hiccups it loses its prospective. 

The novel falls flat as the characters of the fictional narrative has nothing much to offer. I wanted to loath a few characters because that is why they were built to, but, I couldn't. The characters were not much explored. 

I wanted to skip to the historical narration many times, as I felt I was better off not reading the present one. The past gripped my interest, and often I just flew to the chapters of the history and read and reread them.

Furthermore, as the contemporary narrative begins to progress, it loses its tightness. Even in the Historical narration, the dialogues are too contemporary. It's weird to imagine people from that era specially a learned scholar uttering words (particularly abuses) that we hear from the current generation. 
Moreover too many quotes uttered by both the protagonist, cripple the story further. 

I will read this book many times only for the chapters that begin with the title "About 2300 years ago".
I'll take off a few stars from this book for making the half of the narration a tiresome read and giving a few stars for igniting my interest in Chanakya and Chandragupta Maurya again.

*****

This is a part of a review program by MysmartPrice/books 
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16 comments:

  1. "Furthermore, as the contemporary narrative begins to progress, it loses its tightness. Even in the Historical narration, the dialogues are too contemporary." - I agree with you completely. This is the reason why I started the book and lost interest. A lot of exaggeration and unrealistic.

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    Replies
    1. Absolutely. The read becomes very tiring because of this.

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  2. Apt review..I've read this book too and felt the same.. BTW , AS is called Dan Brown of India..lol..

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  3. Hmm... thanks for the caution.

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  4. I am presently reading this book and I can't tell you how I have managed to read till now. The beginning was interesting but now I am reading just to finish it off. Right said, the present narrative is too dull and too boring.

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    Replies
    1. I totally understand your feeling there... the present narration made it so difficult for me to finish this book.

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  5. I thought as much about the story and hence did not buy it. With this review I will probably save my money :D.

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    Replies
    1. haha...and you told me that you heard it is boring...and after reading the first chapter I told you.. naa.. its working for me ... all that enthu faded as I progressed with the book. :P

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  6. neat. even i skipped many parts of the modern story.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks... yes it is a book that can be safely skipped in parts.

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  7. Even I skipped many of the modern part :)

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