Whew! This whirlwind of a book was a reader's feast. The recurring themes of forgiving, choosing love over hate, recognizing each person's ability to change his fate, and "doing the wrong thing for the right reasons" can make this book read like a self-help book or confessional visit at times. Yet, it is also a lush (and sometimes overwritten) swashbuckling adventure, an ambient study of Bombay, a crime novel, a doomed love story as well as a philosophical travelogue akin to "On the Road" or "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." There were even some scenes that reminded me of an Oscar Wilde play or two. Long books usually lead me to berate an editor for not doing their job, but even at 933 pages, I wished Shantaram was longer. I would have continued reading it if it were twice as long. For as devastating as most of the book was, there were some truly funny scenes, some of which involved a bear ("a man must love his bear") and many of which just involve loveable Prabaker's descriptions/hijinx (Prabaker visiting a prostitute, trying to sing "You Really Got Me" by the Kinks, or describing a delicious meal, etc.). There were plenty of times where I rolled my eyes, frustrated by the narrator's impossible good luck, inexplicable morality (given his life of crime and multiple heroin addictions), superhuman tolerance for physical pain, indefatigable street fighting skills, and power to recover from certain death many times over. Don't even get me started on some of the characters who were consistently (nearly annoyingly) pithy, philosophically profound and of course, perfectly, exquisitely damaged. However, the book is big enough, rich enough, incredible enough... it's just *enough* to pull you past those distractions. In spite of it all, this book is beautiful, and I loved it. Read it. Just read it.I learned of this book from a can-you-suggest-really-super-long-books Amazon discussion thread. I picked it up at the airport and it is long and heavy, even in paperback. What convinced me to actually buy it (I buy about one or two books a year - all the rest come from the library), was the author's bio. Read it if you get a chance and tell me if you think there's any way it can really be true. He sounds like a very, very, very bad man, very, very, very much redeemed, and this is his story (embellished, at the very least). I worried that I would fall in love with the book, only to be let down by some James Freyesque scandal. However, it clearly says "NOVEL" on the book and not "MEMOIR." -----------------A few things this book tried to teach me, but I am not sure that I have learned:1. If you are in Bombay and there is a car accident, get the **hell** away from it as fast as you can. It doesn't matter if you are the driver, the passenger, or a bystander. Ask no questions, just go! Get away!2. The slums of Bombay are filled with happy, vibrant people!3. Lepers are smart, cunning, hospitable and apparently, it is safe to drink the water they serve you.4. Bombay gangsters are the most intelligent, fascinating and morally upstanding people on earth and can answer all of your questions about the meaning of life. Copious amounts of hash have no effect on their infinite mental and philosophical capacity. 5. Street fighting: First rule - Stand your ground and never walk backward, unless you're preparing a counter-strike. Second rule - Never put your head down.6. Knife fighting (p.585): First mistake - Fighting on the back foot. (Never step back - just keep on going.) Second mistake - holding the knife as if it was a sword. "A man uses an underhand grip when he expects his knife, like a gun, to do the fighting for him.... The knife is just there to help him finish it. The winning grip is a dagger hold, with the blade downward, and the fist that holds it is still free to punch."NOTABLE QUOTES I WANT TO REMEMBER: p.52 "The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business."p.52 "Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit."p.63 "Most loves are like that, from what I can see." Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independence. After a while you start throwing people out -- your friends, everyone you used to know. And it's still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it's going to take you down with it."p.206 "Good doctors have at least three things in common: they know how to observe, they know how to listen, and they've very tired.p.244 "I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house."p.298 "... what we learn from pain -- for example, that fire burns and is dangerous -- is always individual, for ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one human people."p.353 "...you are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely, to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return."p.372 "And the love that opened in my heart seemed to drag the rest of my life behind it."p.584 "In my first knife fight I learned that there are two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live, and those who live to kill. The ones who like kiling might come into a fight with most of the fire and fury, but the man or woman who fights just to live, who kills just to survive, will usually come out of it on top. If the killer-type begins to lose the fight, his reason for fighting it fades. If the survivor-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it flares up fiercer than ever. And killing contests with deadly weapons, unlike common fistfights, are lost and won in the reasons that remain when the blood begins to run. The simple fact is that fighting to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one."p.596 "...good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict."p.708 "When the student is ready, the teacher appears."p.709 "Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong -- that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right."p.741 "Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women."p.871 "He'd been able to deal with that pain because he'd accepted his own part in causing it. I'd never accepted my share of responsibility... that's why I'd never dealt with it."p.872 "Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow."p.881 "I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries to late to reach for them."p.915 "There is no man, and no place, without war... The only thing we can do is choose a side, and fight. That is the only choice we get -- who we fight for, who we fight against. That is life." p.921 "It is always a fool's mistake... to be alone with someone you shouldn't have loved."
I feel like a bit of an asshole for giving this three stars. Most of my goodreads friends have given this five stars, some four and one person hated it, but it feels like this is a fairly universally loved book. What is my problem? Even outside of the little goodreads universe, people love this book. Jonathan Carroll tells me in his blurb that I'm, "either heartless or dead or both" for remaining untouched by this book (but that is not really true, I was touched by this book, and I have a great deal of respect for the author for living this tale, more on this in a bit). Customers have raved about. I've been asked to recommend other books like this one to people. It sits perennially on the favorites table at work, co-workers stopped to tell me they either liked it or wanted to read it if they saw it in my hand while I was coming or going from the store. And it's so shiny! Can't I give it an extra star for it's golden radiant glow?If I were judging the life of the narrator, which I assume is also pretty much the life of the author, I'd give it five stars. Wow, you did all of this stuff? Pretty much everything in this book I'd be too much of lazy and scared fuck to do for myself. And then you wrote this novel while in a brutal prison and the manuscript pages are stained in your blood? Guards destroyed one of the original drafts of the book on you? I can barely wrap my head around what it would be like to go through all of that on top of living the life described in this book. Five stars, all the way (note to someone else, there should be a goodreads-esque site where people can give star ratings to other peoples' lives, that would catch on, right?)! Which, makes me feel like an even bigger asshole for only giving the book three stars. Part of the problem for me was that I enjoyed the book while I was reading it, but as soon as I put the book down there I never felt compelled to pick it up and read it. I'd read on my commute and on break, but rarely would I read it at home. And even when I took a break from it on the train back to the city from upstate New York, I got my distracted watching the little arrow move on my phone's gps map showing my progress through the lower Hudson Valley and forgot to go back to reading the book on that trip for the last hour or so of my train ride. When I'd pick up the book to read it, I'd enjoy what I read, but nothing ever grabbed me with the desire to plow through the book. But is it so important that you read every book at warp-speed?No, but I want to feel compelled to go on. The only compulsion I really felt was, yeah I should pick up the book if I'm ever going to get through the 933 pages and get to read some other books. It also didn't help that I started reading this while I had a couple of other books sort of going on, too. One of them that dog evolution book that I was really not enjoying. While the events in the story were fascinating, especially since I believed them to be pretty much true, and because this guy is leading a life I couldn't imagine leading myself and being a much better person than I ever am even when he is at his worst; while all of this is true to how I felt about the content, the actually format of the book got on my nerves after awhile. It was too episodic, sort of like Dickens (whom I liked quite a bit in my only attempt to read him (shameful but true), but it's a style I can enjoy when it's in the past, but which I don't really like in contemporary novels. Too often the novel read like this: Start of chapter, deep platitude (like all door ways are passages to the infinite, meet up with the character who is going to be focal in this chapter, usually in a serendipity manner, something happens that the narrator doesn't want to do and is exhorted to try by a character ('touch his belly', 'I don't want to.', 'no, come on touch his belly, yaar', 'no, i don't want to touch his belly', 'c'mon you sister fucker yaar touch the belly,' (go on for a bit in this way) and then he'll touch the belly (or ride the horse, or drink the weird drink, or whatever someone is trying to get him to do) and he'll find he enjoys it or takes some very valuable life lesson from it; then the narrator will do something, and have the mini-adventure of the chapter and meet some other people along the way. Which is a fine way of formatting a novel, but it started to feel really repetitive to me, and while the chapters linked together and events influenced other events I didn't feel like anything was being built by all the stories, it was just a story being told, and that is a good thing and it's a fairly entertaining story but I'm a snob who likes his 900 plus page novels to be more than just a linear story, or if it is going to be just a story I want it grab me by the throat and make me want to go on and loss sleep finding out what happens next. My other 'beef' with the novel is that it disregarded the show don't tell rule of writing. I normally don't even think about this rule when I'm reading, but I started to realize about a third of the way through the book that almost everything I knew about the characters and the type of people they are I knew because I'd been told that is the way they were by the narrator. Very little of their actions showed me the type of person they were, they might say and do interesting things but the way I was supposed to feel about the character was also given to me by some exposition of the narrator. But Greg, have you ever written a novel while being locked up in a punishment unit of an Australian prison? No. I hate when people say this, but I'm going to say it anyway and hate myself for saying it. I think the novel could have been shorter. I think that there was a clunkiness to certain parts of the novel. I'm thinking especially in the last hundred or so pages, the pages I forced myself to sit down and read and not do anything else until I was done with them today. I've been kind of critical of the book because I'm trying to justify my own like, not love for the book. I think my own feelings towards the book are sort of like the enigmatic character Karla's feelings towards other people in the novel, I like it but you can't get me to say I love it.
Do You like book Shantaram (2015)?
On the bottom of page 229: "And it was quiet, in those dark, thinking moments: quiet enough to hear sweat droplets from my sorrowed face fall upon the page, one after another, each wet circle weeping outward into the words fair...forgiving...punish...and save..."I give Shantaram 4.5 stars. I understand it took the author 13 years to write. (given the substantial amount of details to remember from a life most of us are thankful to never have experienced), I can understand why.How did the man have 'time' to write? Gregory David Roberts is wise intelligent man/writer/....and very unique & wonderful human being! (forgiveness comes into thought): Good people have done wrong things....These same people have done GREAT things....An interesting life this man had!He needed to write a book...I needed to read it...Ask me if I cried? (YES...but only on 1 page --out of 936 pages). I don't think anyone would guess the part I cried in either. However: for my friends who read this book...Come back and ask me....I'll tell you later!
—Elyse
Have you ever been in a relationship that you were just done with but you were hoping they would end it and so you suffer through, day after day, rolling your eyes every time that person does that THING that you HATE and, yah, it was kind of fun at first but if they keep doing that THING that you HATE, you are going to end up saying something really mean and you really don't want to do that because they mean well and are nice but they just drive you up the wall?You know what you need to do? You need to save both of you more trouble and pain and just dump that person already, and frankly, that's how I feel about this book, so even though I'm nearly at the end, I can't take it anymore. I roll my eyes every few minutes, I dread turning the audiobook on. It had it's good moments and its merits but this is NOT the book for me.This book is billed as a "semi-autobiographical" story. I'm not sure what to make of that, though I guess it's more honest than some authors are. The story feels a bit like a diary. While the protagonist is almost always the center of any story, this one is particularly so. The main character interacts with other people, and we get some back story on them, but they are always half hearted accounts and they only serve as conduits for learning more about the narrator. This format, wherein you only ever see as far as the main character comprehends the situation, can work, but it's done so lazily, here. Throughout the book, the main character meets someone and then says something like "I don't know why but I _____ the person right away." Lazy. Lazy lazy lazy writing. People feel that way, but authors owe it to their readers to make THEM feel as though they don't know why but they ____ the person. The most atrocious example of this lazy writing is the love-at-first-sight nonsense. I do genuinely believe that people feel intense attractions to certain other people at the moment they see them, but, again, it's the authors job to paint a picture that tells us what he sees in that person. At best, he gives us a portrait of a woman he thinks is beautiful and that he doesn't understand, which means the only thing we feel is that there's some pretty woman with no personality and no complexity to speak of and we are supposed to believe she's worth pining over. These many people the author interacts with, drive the story forward and serve as motivation but, at least for me, I never understood why. I don't cry why people die, I don't feel bad when people leave. I don't know why one woman is more or less desirable than another. I am simply told that this is how the character feels.While this issue struck me from the outset, there is a lot in the story that is interesting and compelling. I've only had a superficial, tourist experience with India, so learning more about everyday life and people there is wonderful, but just as I'd start to sink into the story, I'd be jarred by my second peeve about this book. The author, over and over again, stops the story to make some sort of metaphor about how some event or emotion is like some sort of grandiose, most important thing that has ever been (and pretty much everything is the most something that has ever something'ed). This isn't a case where he makes a particular point, once, maybe twice, that is central to the story. Nope, it's trite little sayings like "Truth is a bully that we all pretend to like" and "Silence is the tortured mans revenge" and "Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves" and on and on it goes, breaking up the flow of the story so the author can impress you with how clever he is. Like exclamation points and adverbs, this sort of mental masturbation needs to be applied sparingly, but it's constant and it wasn't too long before I started to get so focused on when the next detour down poetry lane would be that I simply stopped hearing the story, altogether. On the other hand, if you want to get really piss-drunk, try having a shot every time he pulls one of these gems out. You'll need your stomach pumped. I'll concede that my concerns might be largely a stylistic preference. There are certainly a fair number of people who thought this story was wonderful and poetic. It's not for me, though, and I'm happier for admitting defeat on this. I'll never know how the story ends and I'm fine with that. I give it 2 stars because there really were times when I was engrossed in the story.
—Marnie
I moved this from my "currently reading" shelf to my "read" shelf because there is no "I gave up on this piece of crap" shelf. 600 pages into it, I had to set myself free by throwing it in the toilet. No, seriously, I threw it in the toilet. Then I had to fish it out and clean the deluge of toilet water all over the place created by this tremendously large and heavy piece of crap book. This book makes me angry because I will never get that 600 pages of my life back. I could have been doing something important like closing my eyes really tight to see an intersting light show or going through my neighbors trash. A great deal of this book is obviously autobiographical. I base this clever decution on the fact that the author, who is a former convict who escaped from prison and fled to Bombay where he lived in the slums, started a free medical clinic and joined the mafia, writes a book about a guy who escapes from prison and flees to Bomabay where he lives in the slums, starts a free medical clinis and joins the mafia. As such, it is written in the manner of someone who is scared of offending their former host and who also seems concerned that flaws in the main character will reflect badly on himself, the author. This sacrifices any possibility of creating an intersting, dynamic or realistic main character. It is comletely uncompelling and entirely unbelievable. The story of a westerner who integrates himself into Indian society, starting in the slums, should be facinating. To read this, everything and everyone is wonderful, the people are all so loving and beautiful, blah blah blah. Maybe all that is true, but hey there main character, weren't you a little frustrated and embarrassed when everyone in town lined up to watch you take a crap every morning? Everything negative the character experiences is presented as an account of facts, everything positive is a big sappy gush fest. Give me a break. Then the reader is then regaled with pages upon pages of various characters spoon feeding each other philosphy. Sad twelve year old girls writing poetry could provide more inspiration.I don't understand why this book gets such good reviews. There are so many amazing books about India. Read one of them. Better yet, just go to India. The money you would spend on this book will get you at least 2 meals depending on where you are. If you've had the misfortune of receiving this book as a gift, use it to kill spiders or keep it by your bedside to throw at possible intruders. Just don't waste your time reading it.
—Stacey
