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
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
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
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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