Shantaram: A Novel
by Gregory David Roberts
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Book Reviews of Shantaram: A Novel
Book Review: Vikram Seth meets grunge rock
Summary: 5 Stars
When was the last time you read an epic? More pertinently, when was the last time you read a contemporary book that you would label an epic? It's been a while for me for sure, a fact that tremendously highlighted the pleasure I derived from this book.
[The focus of this review is going to be only the quality of writing, and the wave of feelings precipitated by this book. There's enough been said about the story, and I really want to share how this book made me feel instead.]
So let's start at the very beginning - the opening sentence of the book: "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". And the last line of the first page: "So it begins, this story, like everything else - with a woman, a city, and a little bit of luck." How can one not get hooked to a book which promises to be so artless and almost adolescent in its outlook, combining naiveté with world-weary wisdom as only a few people can at any point in their entire life?
Don't jump to conclusions though - the book is far from being "soft". On the same page, Roberts writes about being "chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved." And this is where the power of the book lies - it can be simple, and startlingly explosive, all at the same time. In part that's attributable to the roller-coaster life the author lead, but it would be unfair to take credit away from Roberts' writing capabilities. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could easily have been over-the-top trash.
My favourite attribute of the book though, is its vivid delineation of Bombay. The book brought to light aspects of Bombay that most people don't hear about ever, and very few see, but which I had caught glimpses of constantly from the corner of my eyes, and was sure were there. Many a time when I had sat at Leopold's, I had noticed the incongruity of the place and suspected that there was more to it than met the eye. It was impossible to escape the subtle undercurrent of misdemeanors, and this book throws the curtains back and shows explicitly how deep the rabbit hole really went. From Colaba to Dharavi, from high-rises to rat-infested gullies, Roberts' portrait of the city's attitude, its mood, its character, is impeccable. And the smell, the smell - I used to think it I was imagining it, but I'm glad to learn that I'm not the only one.
The greatest achievement of this book, for me, was actually not its vivid description of Bombay, but the fact that it actually made me nostalgic for a city I can't bear to be in. When was the last time a book made you feel like that?
Get this book.
Book Review: on the one hand
Summary: 3 Stars
I want to sort out my personal feelings about the book. I am a lover and initially Shantaram made me want to love Gregory Roberts. What I loved about him is his ability to tell a story about a city and people that he loved. I enjoyed how he was able to find the soul of the Indian people and tell about it in a way that I could feel the people, feel the energy of Bombay, be shocked at the rage of a crowd of Indians after an auto accident, go into the smells of the slums, and the beauty of the slums. He helped me loved India. His writing style for me was authentic. He isn't your usual writer and the roughness and lengthiness of his descriptions just reflected his roughness as a person. So his descriptive story telling is masterful and I am richer and wiser from knowing his book.
What wore on me were his relationships. By the end I wanted to shout....what were you thinking....there were just too many dark souless people ...Karla for example. Here was a woman totally afraid to reveal even the basics of herself. Why was the author so attracted to a person who was manipulative secretive and very unskilled at loving. I could understand being bitter about prison experiences and somewhat hardened, but joining the Indian mafia. Where are the warning bells that sing out danger danger danger. This may not be such a great idea. So he is a flawed hero.
And the mafia head that loved him....well he loved him so much that he was willing to risk his dying in the darkness of an Indian prison in order to get money for a greater cause. On the one hand, if Roberts is knowledgeable about the Mafia, he really helps you to understand the strange loyalty and love of these emotionally wounded people. On the other hand, as the story continues on and on and on and these relationships became the focus of the book, I found myself getting depressed about life and love. And then eventually I lost my admiration for the writer. The book had started to get too fantastic and the authors flaws as a human being....began to get more pronounced. I felt like I was in a bad relationship and had been tricked into loving someone that wasn't really so loveable.
The character Prubaker was to me the soul of the book. Laughing loving spirited kind wise. I am grateful for the book that gave me characters like him and descriptions of an India I didn't know. There was a pearl of wisdom in the philosophy section that helped me to wonder if life is moving furthur into complexity. I don't know but it is a challenging and liberating thought.I feel more street saavy and know the darknesses of life with the poor as well as the lightness. In the end it is like life itself, full of suprises and disappointments. I am grateful.
M
Book Review: Poorly written melodrama with suitable plot
Summary: 1 Stars
While there might be some who rave about this being the greatest novel they've ever read, I have to wonder what are the other novels they've read. This isn't even, by far, the best book written about contemporary Mumbai, or Bombay, however you refer to the city. The book is a long-winded ode to violence, with Bombay and other locales (Goa, Afghanistan) as an exotic setting for a mafia tale. The author does create some interesting characters: unfortunately, they are not a lot of the main ones, and the weak spot is the narrator himself, and the Harlequin romance quality prose that accompanies his odes to various loved ones, or descriptions of nature, or Marine Drive during evening, or a kabob stand on Chowpaty Beach, or any one of his male friends in the slums, at Juhu Beach, ad nauseum. Mr. Roberts attempts at metaphor, figurative language and narrative description by and large flounder miserably, leaving the reader feeling vaguely unwell. And it usually accompanies all passages having to do with his paramour Karla, so a few hundred pages into the book, everytime her name is uttered the reader cringes, bracing themself for more turgid love prose.
He does a decent job of capturing the flavor of Mumbai, from Colaba up to Juhu, VT, back Bay, Marine Drive and other spots, though Sukhetu Mehta's non-fiction "Bombay Maximum City" is miles ahead of it. The plot is a continuous mob brawl, so it is ironic that the author portrays himself as a good guy whom everybody loves, when he spends most of his time slicing and dicing his way through the city, setting up smack deals, dealing in phony passports. Its a melodrama with a terminally flawed hero - he can't even muster up much of a love for Karla until well into the book. With all of the glowing accounts of men fighting, brave gangsters, his love for Khaderbai, was I the only one who detected more than a faint theme of homoeroticism in the book? And if he reminded us once more about his ability to speak BOTH Marathi and Hindi I was going to vomit. Did anyone edit this book? If they did, I shudder to think what it read like before.
Oh, and the philosophizing .... "The universe tends towards ever-increasing complexity". That sums up the many pages of philosophy in the book....I soon began to skim these pages. I knew well into the book what would be the final outcome regarding Khader and Karla. Like a lot of action movies, Roberts piles on pages and detaisl to try to get the reader to forget about what obviously will happen.
There are much better novels about India, written by Indians - Ghosh, Mistry, Rushdie, and many others. Trudging through this epic (it should be a TV miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain) left me longing for the oeuvre of Shoba De...
Book Review: Larger than life guy MacGyvers his way through Bombay
Summary: 4 Stars
In June, I started reading this überlong book about Bombay at the recommendation of two bookworm friends. Several months and 933 pages later (having read a number of other books along the way), I've finally finished it. Shantaram is supposedly author Gregory David Roberts' semi-autobiographical story of approximately four years spent by a character nicknamed "Lin," a 30-year-old New Zealander and Australian-prison-escapee living on the seedier side (primarily the streets and slums) of Bombay during the early 80s. The most amazing thing about the book is the number of nearly incomprehensible incidents in which Lin aka Shantaram gets involved, which include (beware of vague references that may be spoilerish) such things as: a really big bear hug; bystanders' actions against the at-fault in an accident; unconventional behavior towards organ donators; fire fortuitousness; cord catching during a death-defying deed; slumming it, doctor-style; escaping from Zhou-catraz; skin seam sewing; tot tutoring; cholera conquering; heroin habit (and kicking cold turkey); gun running; document doctoring; and much, much more.
Shantaram, who seems to spend a lot of time inside his own head, spends a lot of time tossing out philosophical lines (which I like to call, "Linisms"), including: (p 90), "Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it's exactly like love in three ways: it's pushy, it has no real sense of humour, and it turns up where you least expect it," (p 147) "Life on the run puts a lie in the echo of every laugh, and at least a little larceny in every act of love," (p 230) "Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other," (p 398) "Fate's way of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, but never heed," (p 426) "Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it's worry that keeps the knife share, and worry that gets most of us, in the end," and (p 709) "Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name."
In spite of the over-the-top actions on the part of his alternately good guy/bad boy Bombayite, author Roberts can really tell a yarn (though I was not a fan of his man-flowery style descriptions), making Shantaram, in spite of its sometimes long-windedness, worth the read. Better: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
Book Review: Tedious and lacking focus
Summary: 1 Stars
A friend recommended this book, so I vowed to finish all 900 plus pages of it even though halfway through I could see there would be little value in doing so. The author's point, I think, is that love can conquer all and you can determine your own fate, or something like that. But the problems with this book are many.
First, it is hard to sympathize with the main character, an escaped criminal who lost his wife and child to his heroin addiction, which he turned to robbery to support. Although he seeks meaning and salvation throught the book, not once does he make an attempt to atone for the robberies or apologize to his wife and child - which would seem like the obvious first step. There are too many characters most of whom are incidental to the main plot. Less than 50 pages before the end of the book, he is still introducing new characters. His ability as a writer is uneven - sometimes the descriptions are decent, usually the action scenes or the conversations. Too often though he throwns in his shallow, homespun liberal philosophy, ruining the momentum. All these factors and more detract from what could be a very exciting story if it had more focus, more of an overriding theme to it all.
At its best, when he simply reports events as they happen, the book can be quite moving, if not completely believable - for example the way the slum village elder deals with two boys fighting and a man beating his wife. Too often though his descriptions miss the mark, sometimes laugably so - "Money isn't the root of all evil. EVIL is the root of all money" or "happiness is a myth, it was invented to make us buy things" - or at their worst, blissfully ignorant of the facts, for example, the so-called cause for Palestinian statehood.
You can see the plot coming from miles away - I won't reveal the details in case you really really want to read this book - but, just don't expect to be surprised by anything that happens, much less care about all the many characters, few of whom have any redeeming values and most of whom meet senseless deaths. After a while you just stop caring about all of them.
This book can't decide what it wants to be - action/adventure, a traveologue about India, an exploration of the meaning of life, or a sappy romance. It tries to be all of the above and succeeds at none. Ultimately it is a triumph of quantity over quality.
And about all the reviewers who say, "the best book I've ever read." Click on "see all my reviews" beside the reviewer's name. Chances are, it's the ONLY book they've reviewed. Kinda makes you wonder.