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Shantaram: A Novel, by Gregory David Roberts
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"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured."
So begins this epic, mesmerizing first novel set in the underworld of contemporary Bombay. Shantaram is narrated by Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear.
Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter Bombay's hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.
As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city's poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power.
Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas---this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart. Based on the life of the author, it is by any measure the debut of an extraordinary voice in literature.
- Sales Rank: #2602 in Books
- Brand: Roberts, Gregory David
- Published on: 2005-10-01
- Released on: 2005-09-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.22" h x 1.63" w x 5.51" l, 1.60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 944 pages
Amazon.com Review
Crime and punishment, passion and loyalty, betrayal and redemption are only a few of the ingredients in Shantaram, a massive, over-the-top, mostly autobiographical novel. Shantaram is the name given Mr. Lindsay, or Linbaba, the larger-than-life hero. It means "man of God's peace," which is what the Indian people know of Lin. What they do not know is that prior to his arrival in Bombay he escaped from an Australian prison where he had begun serving a 19-year sentence. He served two years and leaped over the wall. He was imprisoned for a string of armed robberies peformed to support his heroin addiction, which started when his marriage fell apart and he lost custody of his daughter. All of that is enough for several lifetimes, but for Greg Roberts, that's only the beginning.
He arrives in Bombay with little money, an assumed name, false papers, an untellable past, and no plans for the future. Fortunately, he meets Prabaker right away, a sweet, smiling man who is a street guide. He takes to Lin immediately, eventually introducing him to his home village, where they end up living for six months. When they return to Bombay, they take up residence in a sprawling illegal slum of 25,000 people and Linbaba becomes the resident "doctor." With a prison knowledge of first aid and whatever medicines he can cadge from doing trades with the local Mafia, he sets up a practice and is regarded as heaven-sent by these poor people who have nothing but illness, rat bites, dysentery, and anemia. He also meets Karla, an enigmatic Swiss-American woman, with whom he falls in love. Theirs is a complicated relationship, and Karla’s connections are murky from the outset.
Roberts is not reluctant to wax poetic; in fact, some of his prose is downright embarrassing. Throughought the novel, however, all 944 pages of it, every single sentence rings true. He is a tough guy with a tender heart, one capable of what is judged criminal behavior, but a basically decent, intelligent man who would never intentionally hurt anyone, especially anyone he knew. He is a magnet for trouble, a soldier of fortune, a picaresque hero: the rascal who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. His story is irresistible. Stay tuned for the prequel and the sequel. --Valerie Ryan
From Publishers Weekly
At the start of this massive, thrillingly undomesticated potboiler, a young Australian man bearing a false New Zealand passport that gives his name as "Lindsay" flies to Bombay some time in the early '80s. On his first day there, Lindsay meets the two people who will largely influence his fate in the city. One is a young tour guide, Prabaker, whose gifts include a large smile and an unstoppably joyful heart. Through Prabaker, Lindsay learns Marathi (a language not often spoken by gora, or foreigners), gets to know village India and settles, for a time, in a vast shantytown, operating an illicit free clinic. The second person he meets is Karla, a beautiful Swiss-American woman with sea-green eyes and a circle of expatriate friends. Lin's love for Karla—and her mysterious inability to love in return—gives the book its central tension. "Linbaba's" life in the slum abruptly ends when he is arrested without charge and thrown into the hell of Arthur Road Prison. Upon his release, he moves from the slum and begins laundering money and forging passports for one of the heads of the Bombay mafia, guru/sage Abdel Khader Khan. Eventually, he follows Khader as an improbable guerrilla in the war against the Russians in Afghanistan. There he learns about Karla's connection to Khader and discovers who set him up for arrest. Roberts, who wrote the first drafts of the novel in prison, has poured everything he knows into this book and it shows. It has a heartfelt, cinemascope feel. If there are occasional passages that would make the very angels of purple prose weep, there are also images, plots, characters, philosophical dialogues and mysteries that more than compensate for the novel's flaws. A sensational read, it might well reproduce its bestselling success in Australia here.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
A thousand pages is like a thousand pounds--it sounds like too much to deal with. Nevertheless, Roberts' very long novel sails along at an amazingly fast clip. Readers in the author's native Australia apparently finished every page of it, for they handed it considerable praise. Now U.S. readers can enjoy this rich saga based on Roberts' own life: escape from a prison in Australia and a subsequent flight to Bombay, which is exactly what happens to Lindsay, the main character in the novel; once in Bombay, he joins the city's underground. Roberts graphically, even beautifully, evokes that milieu--he is as effective at imparting impressions as any good travel writer--in this complex but cohesive story about freedom and the lack of it, about survival, spiritual meaning, love, and sex; in other words, about life in what has to be one of the most fascinating cities in the world. One's first impression of this novel is that it is simply a good story, but one soon comes to realize that Roberts is also a gifted creator of characters--not only Lindsay but also Prabaker, who becomes Lindsay's guide, caretaker, and entree into various elements of Bombay society. Soon, too, one becomes aware and appreciative of Roberts' felicitous writing style. In all, despite the novel's length, it is difficult not to be ensnared by it. And, be forewarned, it will be popular. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
142 of 157 people found the following review helpful.
The Best Novel of the 21st Century...so far
By Daniel Myers
FINALLY, a gut-wrenching, harrowing, well-penned novel, whose author suffers not from the literary constipation of most current "highbrow" authors (He's faced down far more deadly things, chronicled herein, to be affrighted by sharp penned editors.) - A book, in short, that will make your heart bleed with the depths to which the human soul can sink and the glories to which it can rise. ----I read so many books, but this is the first true work of art and genius published in this new century that I've managed to discover. It is a book from which I'm still recovering from having read. Like all great art, it leaves one with a new perspective on the world and causes one to reconnoitre the heart's bearings. The book strips away the lies we tell ourselves and leaves the heartstrings bare for the reader to see, where he/ she will recognise his/her own.
Let's get something straight here: This is not a book of "purple prose" or any form of sentimentality. Each tear shed is wrung from harrowing experience. As Roberts writes, "One of the reasons we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you."--Your soul will have cried with Roberts's many times before the end of the book.
This is truly a book for lovers of great literature. Roberts writes, "I never found a club or a clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it."--This book is one that values the mystery of people and the mystery of human existence above all else. ----Including yours, reader.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Nice prose style but no editor
By Big Apple
Interesting real story (if it is, indeed, real, the historical basis seems to be a bit vague, my guess is that most of it is made up) and clearly the man can write prose, but the book is too long and it is over-rated. The first third is a series of never ending conversations in a Bombay restaurant in which we are introduced to a plethora of characters. It's a slow, very static start and there are way too many names to remember. Then the second third is great. This is where the story lies. The part where he goes to the slum to be a doctor, gets thrown in prison, and gets out. The rest is beautifully written but boring. I'm not surprised the sequel isn't really selling nor that the movie has taken so long to appear. The last third of this book is a HUGE let down. It is slow and unbelievable. For some reason the author has tagged a war story onto what is already a hybrid of genres - prison escape and love story. It just feels too much. The writer heroin addict can learn languages and now he is Rambo? He seems to train forever too. Several years if you add up all the 'And we practised this for three months...' In general, the narrative is at times too ponderous, which is frustrating because at heart this is an action story, a book for guys not gals, and not quite the literary masterpiece it thinks it is. The philosophy conversations between the protagonist and Khader, for example, don't work and are a bit silly. A mafia don espousing on the meaning of life might be a good idea for a character but the realization is cornball. The conversations are too basic, too high school-ish. The 'love story' if you can call it that is poorly delineated. It's the classic case of show don't tell only this author tells and doesn't show. Protagonist Lin TELLS us repeatedly how beautiful she is, how much he loves her, but we are never SHOWN why. We are not convinced the obviously conniving woman is worthy of so much attention and it makes for a sappy hero. It's also a big disappointment that a story about a man who escaped from a maximum security prison devotes so little space to the escape. Two hundred pages of chit chat with characters you'll never remember to open with and then just a few pages on the escape. There's a novel in this beautiful sprawling mess somewhere but truly it needs an editor. Clearly whoever published this and edited it was too in love with the material. Sorry, it's not Melville.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Outstanding, heads and tails above the run of the mill book!
By Kip Derringer
The books plot, twists, and pace would make a great book in itself but it would have to be shorter. It is over 900 pages. What caught me is without trying to shove it down your throat is the Author's love of people. Good, bad, ugly, beautiful, extremely poor, extremely rich, strange, and even straight out hell types of people. The author and main character who who portrays himself as no pillar of society seems to have an intense love of humans and human nature. Not only are the characters and what they do complex but no matter how deep or shallow they are in crime ranging from petty scammers to murderers and even torturers, in by far most cases he pulls the good out of them and demonstrates that even though people get themselves in these situations regularly, that we consider heinous crimes, there is actually good in them that may be hidden deep but is in every human being.
It not only did its job of entertaining, but got me to thinking philosophically about people when I was not reading it. Anybody that knows me would not consider me a philosophical thinker. That is why I rated the mood as thoughtful though it works up to to being every bit as much suspenseful. It is an incredible book that starts out interesting and moved on to the point where if I could manage to put it down by midnight I couldn't wait to get myself back to reading it. I read the book twice. After the first time I went to Southeast Asia, not including India which is the setting of the book, but once to Thailand and twice to Nepal. I really enjoyed the people and some of them could make me laugh harder than I ever have in my life. But they were always trying to pull petty scams. Then when I got back from my third trip I read Shantaram the second time and it put things into perspective. They assume we are all rich while the poorest of them live in plywood and cardboard houses with plastic scraps held down by rocks for a roof. So what is it for the Americans who likely paid over 2K Just to get there and back to get suckered in a petty scam. I thought about my loss of $60.00 to a scam and it seemed more ignorance on my part than a crime on their part and just learned to be more prepared and knowledgeable the next time I bought something. I really liked them other than having to be wary of the scam at any time. But that was all part of the some of the best experiences i had in my life. In addition when I saw how many people were poor and how they lived, I just considered it a donation to charity that can't be written off. Big Deal. Those were the best experiences I ever had.
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