Shantaram: A Novel
by Gregory David Roberts
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gregory David RobertsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-10-01
ISBN: 0312330537
Number of pages: 944
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780312330538
- Condition: New
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Book Reviews of Shantaram: A Novel
Book Review: It's hard to recommend a book that is nearly a thousand pages long because the investment needed is so great. It's one thing to
Summary: 2 Stars
Shantaran by Gregory David Roberts
A former heroin addict, who committed violent crimes in Australia, escapes from the Melbourne maximum security prison and escapes to Bombay (Mumbai) with a New Zealand passport and a false name: Mr. Lindsey. Upon arriving to Bombay he is immediately taken by the city. He befriends a tourist guide: Prabaker Kharre and they develop a very close friendship. Prabaker sets Mr. Lindsey at the India Court House Hotel in the Colaba section of town. The hotel is managed by Mr. Arnaud, who also befriends Mr. Lindsey.
As their friendship grows, Prabaker nicknames Mr. Lindsey Lin (penis), Linbaba and Prabaker becomes Prabu. Prabu invites Linbaba to his village, Sunder, where Linbaba lives for six months with Prabu's parents, Kisha Mango and Rukmabai Kharre and the family. He learns fluent Marathi, the language of Maharashtra state of which Bombay is the capital. He learns to work the land--even to bathe--because in India nakedness is avoided at all costs so he has to wear over pants to be able to bathe. The villagers here rename him Shantaran.
Once he gets back top Bombay, he is robbed and has no money.. Linbaba then moves to a slum, lead by Mr. Qasim Ali Hussein and he lives in a 4ft by 4ft hut. He becomes their "doctor" because he had a first aid kit and had received instruction in first aid. He reads medical books and gets medicines from the leper colony--who survive on the medicine black market trade. Linbaba also does black market activities ti\o sustain himself. Speaking Hindu and Marathi and being white makes it easy for him to sell hash to tourists and collect fees from both the tourists and the sellers. He also helps the tourist in the rupee black market exchange. He becomes famous because he was responsible from saving the slum from a cholera epidemic. Also arranges for the worst cases to be seen at hospitals as he recruits the help of a local doctor.
He meets all the expats at a bar called Leopold. Didier Levi, a gay Frenchman, Karla a beautiful woman who steals his heart, Molina and Ulla a couple. Karla convinces him to save a woman, Lisa Carter, from the tight grip of Bombay's most famous madam: Madam Zhou. She owned a Palace and was a very mysterious woman. No one had ever seen her. To get Lisa out, Linbaba had to pretend to be attached to the British embassy and pay the money to release Lisa. Nothing goes as planned, but they get Lisa out.
Karla goes to Goa and Linbaba follows her there. They finally make love and Karla asks Linbaba to stay with her there, otherwise he'll never see her again. But Linbaba's soul is in Bombay so he returns.
Soon after his return, he is arrested and sent to Arthur Road Prison in Bombay. Apparently Madame Zhou tells the Bombay police about Linbaba's criminal past in Australkia and he suffers several months until his friend, Abdul Ghani, can release him. But that means that he is now part of Bombay's mafia; lead by Abdel Khaled Khan and his council. They basically ran deals with money exchanges, passports, and gold smuggling. Linbaba is good at all of them because he can gain the trust of foreigners and also speaks the native language. He starts making lots of money and moves to an apartment in Colaba.
Unfortunately, Abdel Khaled Khan is an Afghan and he wants to help his country fend off the Russian invasion so they form a group of men who will smuggle arms and medicines to the resistance. This part of the book was sort of boring and I, personally, would have cut it from the story. After everyone gets killed, Abdul and Linbaba manage somehow to return to Bombay. Karla ends with another man, and Linbaba ends with Lisa. Prabu is killed in an explosion and is mourned by all.
The book is full of new discoveries, strange worlds, and various epiphanies about life and how others view it and live it, heavy on clichés, white heroes in foreign lands, and disappointing endings. Most of the less favorable reviews have harped on the same points: the book is far too long, Roberts' style can be painfully verbose, tedious, and sophomoric, and the character Lin becomes increasingly more unsavory and his exploits less believable to sustain the reader's interest.
Specifically, Roberts rambles on so often and for so long that what are initially very observant and occasionally poignant passages, soon morph into tiresome philosophical ramblings that are reduced to fortune cookie pabulum due to their constant infusion in the text. Further, the main character Lin is a sympathetic hard-luck guy in the beginning, but by the midpoint of the story he has turned into a Hollywood action hero and Roberts/Lin is compelled to constantly remind us of how amazing his life story has been and how selfless, understanding, courageous, thoughtful, and thoroughly bad-ass he is. Even when he tries to play up his weaknesses; the self-doubt, the abandonment of his family, his addictions, etc., it's remarkably devoid of lessons learned. This is not a tale of redemption despite what Roberts intended, but rather an unending fish tale.
Despite the faults, however, the story does read pretty well at times. He paints a vivid and enticing portrait of India, an even more remarkable job considering the parts of that country where much of the story takes place. As has been widely agreed upon, the first third of the book is very engaging. I would've loved this book if it had simply stopped after he set up his slum infirmary, but unfortunately, that's not even half way through. Make no mistake; he has indeed lived a stunning life. Merely reading the back cover will have your jaw drop a little. And yet, that's the problem. Roberts' ego and fascination with his own life refuse to yield to editing and that's where this book fails the reader. He cashes in the goodwill he spent several hundred pages cultivating and, by the end, I felt his character had long overstayed his visit and had now become a self-aggrandizing boor. What could've been something special and life-affirming ended up leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. I felt emotionally betrayed by the author. To spend so much time cultivating a beautiful flower only to piss on it is a huge waste.
It's hard to recommend a book that is nearly a thousand pages long because the investment needed is so great. It's one thing to read a novel of a few hundred pages and find out you didn't care for it. It's quite another to spend hours and weeks and perhaps months trying to get through a book that doesn't have that much to say and could have easily said it with far fewer words.
Summary of Shantaram: A Novel
"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.
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.
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
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