Shantaram: A Novel
by Gregory David Roberts
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Book Reviews of Shantaram: A Novel
Book Review: To choose war or love - Or a book on how it is to pretend to be ugly for at a later date to be beautiful?
Summary: 5 Stars
And so it is ending. After waking up seven as usual, I have been out in the sunrise in my little paradise island and writing on my book. When I no longer can bear to write more, i treat myself by reading the end of what someone else has written. Ie the furious and completely brilliant book that hit me so right that I have been enjoying it piece by piece, slowly, contemplatingg, month after month.
But now I can not hold on much longer, being lead to the books very own special little peroratio. I can not stop reading, so I sit out in the now increasingly hot sun in the middle of the exotic garden with the beach and the sea just two meters in front of me. Reading another chapter. Handles me from food, but the sweat pooring in the increasingly hot sun is worse ;-) Taking a dip in the sea again, continue to read, and then a dip and a swim again...
And then book is ended. Completely ended!?!? It's like a whole round the world trip ends. Or close intimate relationship, in the most powerful of relationships? And so it suddenly ends?
The Book I am talking about is the nearly thousand-page master piece that my chosen sister and her group of girlfriends said was all about me. And they have no idea how right they were. A book that while I'm reading page after page is giving me so many reminders and resemblances, often funny, sometimes not too flattering. And even if it is neither the right moment nor the place to embroider what, it's so similar that I come to the realization I do not really need to write my own book, cause that has Roberts, Mr. Shantaram, "The man of peace", already done.
After another dip in the beautiful sea, I sit myself on a little colder place under a coconut tree and look out over the glittering sea of the little paradise island I'm to write the book I am doing myself. What is the little adorable miracle pience really about? I mean really, what is it really (!) about?
Lifting us a level from all heroic, adventure, love stories and other things, it could on a superficial plane be summed up with a book that is very much about "bromance", seasoned with a certain amount of love. And ta a larger point of actually choosing war more often than love.
But it is still in a more superficial plane. For the fact is that what this actually is, is a book on strategy. An absolutely brilliant book on strategy offline - a book on strategy I by chance happen to read just while I come to my island to write the last chapters of my own book about strategy (even if a bit more practical in terms of the world's first real book on Online Strategy :-D).
More specifically, Shantaram is a book about how you on the short term can make the wrong things for the wrong reson, which for the strategist in the longer term may well prove to be the wrong thing for the right reasons.
Simply how the strategists who, like Shantarams self-chosen "father" Khaderbhai and his gang of Abdullah, Khaled Ansari, Salman, Karla, and other exciting personalities - who chooses war, and for which the goal is everything, and, worse still, the goal always sanctifies everything - it is forever evident how you sometimes have to pretend to be ugly for at a later date to be really beautiful.
While all lifeloving humanists, such as Shantarams other, and actually un-chosen, "father" Quasim Ali Hussien and his fellow companions such as Prabaker, Johnny Cigar, Anand Rao, Joseph, Rukhmabai and other magnificent people - who choose love, and for whose soul it is as obvious that the goal is nothing, while the road is everything - always are beautiful, whether their actions ultimately leads to something beautiful or not.
It is simply a fantastic book. A book not to read quickly as a worldly pleasures for the mind, but to enjoy contemplating as a real treat for the soul. A book so good that I begrudge it to everyone and everything.
A book so good that I could barely have written it better myself. But I will anyway :-) Not right now, as I sit under my coconut tree with the beach and the sea just a few feet away, while I let absolutely great food and wonderful motion nurturing the body, while beautiful thoughts and wonderful sights gives inspiration to soul. Not now as the head in its term so far is assigned to thoughts with a focus on just strategies.
But as soon as my head catches up with both the body as well as the soul, it will come through. The book on The Omnipotent truth - the book that my father and myself, in a rare moment of self-distance and self-mockery, baptized "Everything You Want to Know about Anything" ;-)
But that will be another story. In another time. In another place. Until then, I would like mostly to wish all a lot of love. And the joy to in all moments, in the large and small, always choose love over war :-)
Shantaram
Ilha de Boipeba, Bahia, Brazil, July 2009
Book Review: Roller coaster life of high adventure, love and crime
Summary: 4 Stars
When I finished reading this 900-odd page book, I thought, 'Wow! what a life of splendid adventure, love, friendship and crime in a foreign land!'. It was real five-star material and I would have given it five stars. But then, subsequent investigation showed me that the book is actually only a novel based on real-life events in the life of the author Gregory David Roberts (GDR). That dampened my enthusiasm a bit because the book is written in first person and all through it sounds so authentic and true that one is left in sheer admiration at the life of GDR in Bombay in the 1980s. Once I knew that it is a novel, I was left wondering which parts are fiction and which ones are facts.
The author, an Australian, has a charmed existence in Bombay, arriving there after escaping from a maximum security prison in Melbourne, Australia, and reaching Bombay in 1982 with a false New Zealand passport. In Bombay, he slips into the backpackers' haunt around the Gateway of India, Leopold's cafe, Taj Mahal Hotel and the Colaba Causeway. He is adopted as a friend by Prabhaker, a delightful slum-dwelling taxi driver who gives him the name Linbaba - Lin for short (from his false passport name of Lindsay). From then on, Lin goes on a roller coaster life over the next few years, living in a slum with Prabhaker and helping the honest, hard-working slum-dwellers as a substitute doctor and fully integrating himself there. Lin spends six months in Sunder, Prabhaker's village, and learns the local language Marathi in addition to Hindi. The villagers love him and Prabhaker's mother gives him the Indian name - Shantaram which means 'man of peace'.
Shantaram returns to Bombay, falls in love with the beautiful Karla Saarnen, an American girl in Bombay and eventually meets up with one of the mafia dons, Abdul Khader. Khaderbhai, as he is called, likes him and brings him in fully into his 'business' of passport smuggling, illegal currency trading, even gun-running in the cause of the Afghan war. He even poses as an American diplomat and rescues a lovely blonde American girl, Lisa Carter, from the brothel of Madame Zhou. This results in him getting imprisoned in the notorious Arthur Road prison in Bombay. Shantaram even dabbles in Bollywood, goes to fight eventually in Afghanistan along with the Mujahids and returns alive back in Bombay.
It is exciting stuff all through and the book ends with his father figure of the mafia, Abdel Khader dying in Afghanistan and the next generation of the mafia council taking over the operations in their region of Bombay. Finally, the author gets caught in Germany in 1990 on one of his mafia 'jobs', gets extradited to Australia to serve out the rest of his prison term where he writes two drafts of the voluminous book only to be torn down by the cruel warders.
Shantaram writes about brutal torture in the Australian prison system, which came as a surprise to me, having lived in that beautiful country all through the 1980s. Shantaram also has immense love for Bombay and its people, in fact for Indians in general. It is obvious from his writing that he is very much at home in Bombay and was fully integrated with the lives of its people in spite of being a white man. His book shows how the Bombay mafia, for all its crimes, is very considerate towards the poor and also very secular and inclusive in spite of the fact that many of them happen to be from one community - Muslims. I was intrigued by one of their products which is called 'the poverty passport'! The mafia makes a false passport on credit for poor villagers whereby the village sends one young man under this passport to the Gulf countries so that he can work hard, make money, pay off the passport cost and then save enough for making a second passport so that another compatriot from the village can get his 'povert passport' so that he can lift more people out of poverty in their village! Another thing that is obvious from the book is that the police and the politicians are routinely cruel and exploitative towards the poor whereas the mafia is not.
I used to live in Bombay very close to the Gateway of India in the 1970s and it was a revelation to me that so much drug trafficking and crime was going on in the seemingly peaceful and colorful backpackers' haunt across from the hostel where I was living. Shantaram was living a life of crime in Bombay even though he does not commit any murders. However, one is left only with admiration and love for him rather than feel critical of him for being a criminal who tries to justify himself through his compassion for Bombay's poor.
The book is long but it grabs you all the way. It has an electrifying start and you are hooked and simply can't do much else till you finish it.
Book Review: Dareisay it, Shantaram invites obsession
Summary: 5 Stars
I experienced two "states of grace" in connection to this amazing piece of literary fiction by Australian writer Gregory David Roberts.
At first, there was my initial impulse to *buy* SHANTARAM. Buried beneath what is now perhaps pixellated miles of well-deserved kudos (see other Amazon.com reviews below) on Roberts' life-work was one particularly moving commentary which I shall dare to paraphrase. It went along the lines of: "...I'd been waiting for a novel like SHANTARAM for nearly forever...and if I'll never read another like it in ten years, I'll be more than satisfied. Shantaram was the one I was waiting for. I don't think I'll be as moved by anything quite like it for a long while yet."
I knew, right then and there, that SHANTARAM was something I just *had* to get my hands on. If you'll reference my review of Roberts' intriguing short tale, entitled ROMA, available at Amazon's `Shorts' section - you'll observe there how I came across this author's work quite by accident (hard to believe after SHANTARAM, though). In fact, I now sheepishly and foolishly admit that I thought Roberts short story had a `Roma,' or gypsy, theme to it, and for that reason it stood out for me, I having recently spent time in Eastern Slovakia where I've got kin.
Once I'd opened the PDF and read it, I was quite shocked by what appeared. Combining captivating lines, true-to-character dialogues, and distinct personalities within a short few pages, Roberts' ROMA supplied just a glimpse of what was soon to become a literary feast with SHANTARAM.
But I mentioned *two* states of grace, didn't I?
Well, the second time came when I'd cracked the fresh paperback's binding and dug into the story of Roberts' background. The material itself - graceful, eloquent, and relentlessly magnetic -- kept me turning the pages. Grace#1 -> my impulse to buy. Grace#2 -> once I'd read it, and the impulse to continue reading. I finished this tome in less than a week (!) because - and I take a risk in saying this - it became nothing short of my obsession.
I realize that to normally admit to such things in the course of an Amazon review is somewhat in keeping with bad taste, but seeing as we're all friends I suppose it hardly matters now.
It was because I just needed to know what became of Lin (Roberts' alter ago), sometimes more than I felt like eating dinner. I was locked into the burgeoning love interest between Lin and the scintillatingly beautiful Karla - starcrossed lovers hailing from opposite ends of the globe - Lin from Australia (by way of New Zealand), Karla from Switzerland...I just needed to know what would become of them (which I won't spoil for you). Their dalliance was related by Roberts with such a thrilling style and drive - all hail to Roberts for pulling us along this path inexorably.
There were heaps of such examples over the course of the nearly one thousand delightful pages of SHANTARAM...Roberts recounts his life's work with a Rod Sterling-esque, Hitchcock-ian style...even the Grand Masters themselves would have been abundantly pleased.
In advance, I realized a review was forthcoming at the end of my read. I thought several times about plucking relevant snippets and quotables from this long narrative, to pepper them liberally in here for your later enjoyment/inspiration as part of my review. But somehow I figured it'd do nothing but spoil the `Roberts magic.'
Lest you think there isn't a Camelot-like spell which the author casts upon you, I recommend - dear reader - nothing less than to get your hands on SHANTARAM for yourself.
See, the seeming "problem" with works like SHANTARAM - as I'm sure author Roberts has contemplated at least a few times, perhaps moreso recently - is just *what* does he do for an encore?!
With something *this* good, this meaningful, and this personally challenging (as most of you will come to learn, Roberts had the first two drafts of his work scrapped (!!!) by the prison authorities where he was incarcerated) I can't possibly conceive of what might follow.
Needless to say, I won't need a recommendation.
I'm already, as the Aussies say, "in like Flynn."
Word is that a film is in the works. If this doesn't win a couple of awards along the movie's journey, then Hollywood's gone all to pot and I'm going to eat my Borsalino.
`Nuff said.
Book Review: You Couldn't Make This Up
Summary: 5 Stars
A previous reviewer on these pages suggested this book is a once-a-decade reading event and that's probably about the best way to sum it up. The sheer variety of experiences the author recounts in it is nothing short of amazing, and its thousand or so pages go by effortlessly. But this also might be its problem. There are actually about four full-length novels worth of material in here, and that the author chose to consolidate all of this into one tome probably subtracts to some degree from its literary merit.
It begins with the thirtyish author/narrator on a bus to Bombay for the first time in his life. He is a refugee, an escaped prisoner from a maximum security prison in Australia, and there's no going back. His initial adventures in Bombay, his descriptions of the city, his impressions of the people, and his friendship with Prabaker--a friendship which leads him to spend six months working on Prabaker's family farm in central India--would comprise the first novel.
It is great. The characters he meets, both Indian and European, are fascinating and distinctly original, his descriptions of city and country and customs of the Indians in both are detailed and engrossing, and the plot moves briskly. The author understands dramatic tension and knows how to sustain it.
This aspect is about 250 pages and we're not even a quarter of the way through the novel! The next segment finds the narrator in a Bombay slum, after being robbed by a street gang of every rupee he owns. He gradually begins practicing medicine to these terribly destitute people and literally becomes one of them. The highlights here include a dog pack attack, a cholera epidemic, and a locally administered punishment to a public wife-beater. Again, the scene and character descriptions are exotic and fascinating, and again the plot moves along briskly.
This plotline comes to an end when the narrator is unjustly jailed--a harrowing, horrifying experience--and thus begins his third adventure, as he becomes a working member of the Bombay mob following his release. He's a counterfeiter, a smuggler and an enforcer, among other things, and is involved in all kinds of illegal and dangerous activity. Again the narrative is rich with description and character, and it is entirely credible.
But nope, we're not done yet. The Bombay mob leader, an Afghani, decides to go on a journey to Afghanistan in an effort to help his tribes-people defeat the Russian invaders, and he needs the assistance of our hero. Yep, he goes, and yep, we have a fourth, practically astonishing, utterly engrossing adventure.
You can't really beat this for entertainment. Not only do you get all of this adventure, but surprisingly you get it told to you by a very sensitive, introspective narrator. Yes, he's a tough guy on the outside--is he ever--but he's never proud or boastful of this; indeed, he is almost apologetic. "Tough guy," he muses. "Perhaps the saddest phrase in the English language." He recognizes that the life he had chosen to lead in Australia led to pain and sorrow, both for himself and for others.
But his thoughtfulness can occasionally go a bit too far. Seemingly every chapter must end with a page or two's worth of philosophical ruminations on friendship, or love, or the meaning of life, or some such thing, and although some of this is good, it becomes a bit predictable. Easy to forgive, though, when one considers all that he has been through.
This is a huge book with huge content, huge ideas and huge characters, and is never, not for one second--despite its massive length--even remotely boring. But it is an awful lot to swallow, so much so that its themes--and there are all kinds of them poking around in here--get lost in the tumult. You get thrown into a raging river when maybe all you wanted was a drink of water.
But what a ride! Do not be deterred. This novel is a colossus, an unforgettable experience.
Book Review: Psychadelic fable or calculated con trick? - you decide.
Summary: 2 Stars
Have you ever had an experience where a gregarious, but slightly dodgy stranger engages you in conversation and launches into a rambling series of tall tales about their life to which you respond by smiling and saying "Really? How interesting." in an attempt to be polite and non-judgmental - but as time goes on inconsistencies within the narrative become more and more glaringly apparent until with dawning horror you realize that you are in fact sitting next to a delusional psychopath who not only considers you a gullible fool, but possibly intends you mortal harm? Reading Shantaram I experienced just such an uncomfortable feeling of being taken for a ride by a career grifter. I missed the hype surrounding the initial launch of the book so I don't know whether it is intended to be a real life story presented as actual fact, or a deliberately hyperbolic allegory built upon a skeleton of events from the author's life. Clearly a lot of the success of the book so far has depended on its being perceived as the former, and since the incidents in the story are outside my (and probably most readers') direct experience, or otherwise unverifiable (Mumbai underworld activities, mujehadeen guerilla warfare) I am quite willing to give the benefit of the doubt. However, small implausibilities in the more mundane sections of the novel chip away at the writer's credibility and gradually bring into increasing doubt the veracity of the whole. For example, overhearing a conversation in Urdu between Karla and Nazeer, Lin says that he understands only every third or fourth word - but conversational Urdu is practically the same as conversational Hindi in which he claims to be fully fluent. Later he says that he can perform twenty sets of thirty pushups with a minute of rest between sets - please try this at home - it's a pretty tall order for even an Olympic athlete, let alone someone drying out from a three month heroin binge. On another occasion he writes that nine men were able to survive for a month in the mountains of Afghanistan with no other food but the flesh of a single goat - how? These are just a few random examples, but the point is that if we can't trust the author's account of his language abilities, diet or workout routines, can we really trust the more sensational accounts of his apparently superhuman fighting prowess, ability to withstand torture and sexual success with a string of smoking hot babes? Of course it could be that Roberts' intention is to present events in the hyperbolic, super-real style of 80s Bollywood in which Indian everymen are able to overcome insuperable odds and take on armies of evil gangsters with their bare hands - in which case the novel succeeds brilliantly as a sort of psychadelic, smellovision fable for our times. But if he is presenting the events of the novel as autobiographical fact with a completely straight face then one can't help suspecting that we are reading the delusional ramblings of a self-aggrandizing windbag. Structurally the book suggests comparisons with Sade's longer works - sprawling lists of sensational incident separated by babbling philosophical treatises - but spiritually the character Lin has most in common with is Tomb Raider's Lara Croft. If, as I suspect, the book is in fact no more than a colorful fabrication purporting to be true I can't really understand why James Frey was hung out to dry whilst Roberts remains the toast of the town.