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Based on his own extraordinary life, Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram is a mesmerizing novel about a man on the run who becomes entangled within the underworld of 1980s Bombay—the basis for the Apple + TV series starring Charlie Hunnam. /> "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." An escaped convict with a false passport, Lin flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter the city'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.
Limelite: Another sweeping story about the lives of the poor in Mumbai set during the same time period but told by an Indian narrator rather than a white Australian.
I felt uncomfortable with the main character being presented as a good guy, when in fact he’s a criminal with a violent past. A lot of the other characters are colourful but not very believable. It was astounding that all the women he meets are incredibly beautiful, what a lucky fella ! Rather longwinded at times, but some good action scenes, overall tho, I did enjoy the story. ( )
Yes, this book is looooooong. Yes, the author gets cloyingly florid in his prose, at times. Yes, there is a lot of philosophical discourse which may or may not align with your own sensibilities. And, yes, I loved every minute of this audiobook; from the opening words, I was hooked. Most of my audiobook listening time comes during my commute to and from work (15 minutes each way), and during dead time at work, when there is nothing else vying for my attention. Luckily, however, with my wife out of town, on a no-men-allowed, mother-daughter road trip, I was able to devote many hours to listening at home, without the guilt of tuning out my dearly beloved.
While the book was often quite “talky,” with the narrator, Lin, telling us, rather than showing us the action, it never failed to retain my interest. From the loving, heartfelt descriptions of Bombay, to the myriad characters introduced to us, I became completely immersed in this world. And, while it is true there are pithy epigrams, similes, metaphors, and philosophical one-liners sprinkled liberally throughout the book (as well as many genuine nuggets of wisdom), they never detracted from my enjoyment of the story.
Despite its faults, I found this book to be an exhilarating ride through the underworld of Bombay, and the war-torn landscape of Afghanistan, made all the more thrilling by knowing the author experienced most of this first-hand. ( )
The reviews on this one are diametrically opposed - you either love it or hate. Count me in Team Lin, as I loved the book, for all its flaws.
Basic story here is a that an escaped convict from Australia flees to India and falls in love with Bombay. He gets himself enmeshed with the lives of people in all strata of the community, and ends up working out a few demons along the way.
First, as to the negative accounts of "white saviorism" and "cliche" I would like to point out that whatever the author may or may not have done, m he definitely lived in Bombay. And he lived all overarm including some of the slums. I'm frankly tired of the tired critiques from people who say 'the white guy shouldn't write about that.' What's he supposed to write about if not his life? Should he make all the characters a bunch of other white guys in the middle of Bombay - some kind of West Side Story without any color? That's just backwards. Fictionalized though it may be, he did the thing everyone says to do, he wrote what he knew.
Second, while there may be a bunch of philosophizing throughout the narrative, it strikes me as somewhat shallow to complain about that. Maybe those folks haven't reflected enough to come up with their own philosophies, or are too dim to open their minds to other philosophies. Would I agree with every last nugget? Of course not, but I didn't agree with all my philosophy readings either - the point was to expose yourself and think about it critically. .
Finally, I didn't like the love story either. Again, though, I feel like that's the point. Lin's love story with Karla is more about their addictive nature than it is about true love. Karla is clearly not in love with him, not really. She's not meant to be likable, nor is she meant to actually be the perfect ideal of a woman in the way that Lin always describes her. It's just another broken piece of his life with which he hasn't dealt.
For those who say the prose is overly sanguine, I'd recommend those folks not read [[Thomas Wolfe]] or [[Pat Conroy]] either. Look, if you don't like that kind of writing, go read something else and quit degrading this.
Besides the questionable philosophy and the overly floral poetry it’s a great story filled with interesting characters, the most interesting being Bombay herself ( )
After reading other reviews (particularly Adina's one :-)), I'm changing my mind: it goes from 4 to 3 stars.
It's true it's an addictive book, you want to know what happens. But it's just such an ego trip: me me me. The main character is rather annoying and so is bloody Karla. There way too many sentences aimed to be quoted and the fights are, well, rather unbelievable.
On the positive side, there are so many lovely characters. Also all the details about the culture, India in general and the city in particular. ( )
"Roberts is a sure storyteller, capable of passages of precise beauty, and if his tale sometimes threatens to sprawl out of bounds and collapse under its own bookish, poetic weight, he draws its elements together at just the right moment."
En gedigen lesefest. Dersom du syntes Papillon var bra, vil du elske «Shantaram», en røverhistorie som makter å gjøre de sjelelige prosesser hovedpersonen gjennomgår, til en integrert del av helheten.
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.
Quotations
At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them, even after they're dead and gone.
They'd lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn't like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can't kill love. You can't even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it's a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.
And I'd learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest of intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better. (p.81)
It was at once his most endearing and most irritating quality, that he always told me the whole of the truth.
But repression, they say, breeds resistance in some men, and I was resisting the world with every minute of my life.
'Didier,' Ulla sighed, mouthing his name with a smile of exquisite sweetness, 'have I told you to get fucked yet?' ¶ 'No!' he laughed, 'But I forgive you for the lapse. Between us, my darling, such things are always implied, and understood.'
'So ... when will it be the time for the getting on the train?' ¶ 'I think ... a little bit almost quite very soon, and not long.'
There was pride in his face, but he was sad, and tired, and worried. It took me a long time to realise that all farmers, everywhere, are just as tired, worried, proud, and sad: that the soil you turn and the seed you sow are all you really have, when you live and work the Earth. And sometimes, much too often, there's nothing more than that—the silent, secret, heartbreaking joy God puts into things that bloom and grow—to help you face the fear of hunger and the dread of evil.
It's a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust.
He was one of thousands of health professionals working in the city, with careers as distinguished in what they denied themselves as in what they achieved every working day.
Good doctors have at least three things in common: they know how to observe, they know how to listen, and they're very tired.
Prison pulls the masks away from men. You can't hide what you are, in prison. You can't pretend to be tough. You are, or you're not, and everyone knows it.
'We are the not-people,' Prabaker said happily, 'And these are the not-houses, where we are not-living.'
I wrapped the silence around myself like a scarf, and stared past her softly sculptured profile to the haphazard beauty of the street.
It's one of the five hundred things I love about Indians: if they like you, they do it quickly, and not by half.
Some women cry easily. The tears fall as gently as fragrant raindrops in a sun-shower; and leave the face clear and clean and almost radiant. Other women cry hard, and all the loveliness in them collapses in the agony of it.
'The Holy Koran tells us that all things in the universe are related, one to another, and that even opposites are united in some way. I think that there are two points about suffering that we should remember, and they have to do with pleasure and pain. The first is this: that pain and suffering are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist without suffering, and it is also possible to suffer without feeling pain.'
'I think that when we learn from pain—for example, that fire burns and is dangerous—it is always individual, for ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one human people. If we do not suffer with our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle. We do not learn from it what makes us stronger or better or closer to God.'
When we're young, we think that suffering is something that's done to us. When we get older—when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another—we know that real suffering is measured by what's taken away from us.
As exhaustion finally claimed me, submerging my doubts and confusions, the shrewd clarity of near-sleep suddenly showed me what it was that those new friends—Khaderbhai, Karla, Abdullah, Prabaker, and all the others—had in common. They were all, we were all, strangers to the city. None of us were born there. All of us were refugees, survivors, pitched up on the shores of the island city. If there was a bond between us, it was the bond of exiles, the kinship of the lost, the lonely, and the dispossessed.
Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that's all we have—to hold on tight until the dawn.
On the golden crescent, across the small bay, apartment towers for the rich stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, all the way to the embassy district at the Point. In the large courtyards and recreation areas of those towers, the wealthy walked and took the air. Seen from the distant slum, the white shirts of the men and colourful saris of the women were like so many beads threaded by a meditating mind on the black strings of asphalt paths.
I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live.
Didier, trying to warn me, trying to help me or save me, perhaps, had said once that nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn't meant to be.
'We concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions, and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime.'
Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn't, let ourselves become.
it's impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love.
After a bout of bartering that invoked an august assembly of deities from at least three religions, and incorporated spirited, carnal references to the sisters of our respective friends and acquaintances, a dealer agreed to hire out an Enfield Bullet motorcycle for a reasonable rate.
Renowned for its idiosyncratic handling as much as for its reliability and durability, the Bullet was a bike that demanded a relationship with its rider. That relationship involved tolerance, patience, and understanding on the part of the rider. In exchange, the Bullet provided the kind of soaring, celestial, wind-weaving pleasure that birds must know, punctuated by not infrequent near-death experiences.
As I rode the wind, a week after Khader's little lecture on ethics, weaving the bike through ancient-modern traffic beneath a darkening, portentous rumble of clouds, those words echoed in my mind. The wrong thing, for the right reasons. I rode on and, even when I stopped thinking about Khader's lesson, those words still murmured in the little grey daydream-space where memory meets inspiration. I know now that the words were like a mantra, and that my instinct—fate's whisper in the dark—was trying to warn me of something by repeating them. The wrong thing ... for the right reasons.
No-one else in Khaderbhai's network seemed to share my sense of outrage or my shame. There's probably no single group of citizens who are more cynical about politics and politicians than professional criminals. In their view, all politicians are ruthless and corrupt, and all political systems favour the powerful rich over the defenceless poor. And in time, and in a sense, I began to share their view because I knew the experience in which it was grounded. Prison had given us an intimate acquaintance with human-rights violations, and every day the courts confirmed what we'd learned about the law: the rich in any country, and any system, always got the best justice money could buy.
The effect, no matter how skillfully achieved, is always born in the artist's intuition. And intuition can't be taught.
The tall Iranian entered silently, dressed in black like a thing made from the night itself.
Even if we never pity them at any other time, and in any other way, we should pity the dead when we look at them, and touch them. Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return and, because of that, every act of pity is a kind of prayer. And dead men demand prayers. The silent heart, the tumbled nave of the chest unbreathing, and the guttered candles of the eyes—they summon our prayers. Each dead man is a temple of ruins, and when our eyes walk there we should pity, we should pray.
You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.
'Fanaticism is the opposite of love,' I said, recalling one of Khaderbhai's lectures. 'A wise man once told me—he's a Muslim, by the way—that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. I agree with him, and I feel the same way. I also agree with Winston Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who won't change his mind and can't change the subject.'
Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.
Cold turkey off heroin is life with the skin torn away.
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.
Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women.
When you know you're going to die, there's no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom.
I passed several rooms that were burned. In one of them, the fire had been so fierce that the floor was missing, and the charred bearers showed through the gaps like the ribs of some great animal's remains.
Her hands, as limp and expressionless as her slack mouth, lay in her lap like things washed up on a deserted shore.
'The last time I went there, he was working on this new idea. He was filling empty packaging with plaster, using the bubble packs that used to have toys in them, you know, and the foam boxes you get packed around a new T.V. set. He calls them negative spaces. He uses them like a mould, and he makes a sculpture out of them. He had a hundred things there—shapes made out of egg cartons, and the blister-pack that a new toothbrush came in, and the empty package that had a set of headphones in it.' ¶ I turned to look at her. The sky in her eyes held tiny storms. Her lips, embossed with secret thoughts, were swollen to the truth she was trying to tell me. ¶ 'I walked around there, in his studio, you know, looking at all these white sculptures, and I thought, that's what I am. That's what I've always been. All my life. Negative space. Always waiting for someone, or something, or some kind of real feeling to fill me up and give me a reason...'
I rode the elevator down to the foyer alone with the crowd of my mirror selves: beside and behind me, still and silent, not one of them was able to meet my eye.
The word mafia comes from the Sicilian word for bragging. And if you ask any serious man who commits serious crimes for a living, he'll tell you it's just that—the boasting, the pride—that gets most of us in the end. But we never learn.
Money stinks. A stack of new money smells of ink and acid and bleach like the fingerprinting room in a city police station. Old money, vexed with hope and coveting, smells stale like dead flowers kept too long between the pages of a cheap novel.
Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one that you do.
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 too late to reach for them.
'Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting,' she murmured.
Children slept on shoulders, their unwilled arms and legs hanging limp as wet washing on a line.
Based on his own extraordinary life, Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram is a mesmerizing novel about a man on the run who becomes entangled within the underworld of 1980s Bombay—the basis for the Apple + TV series starring Charlie Hunnam. "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." An escaped convict with a false passport, Lin flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter the city'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.
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(4.13)
Long book about India
Wikipedia in English (2)
9
Rather longwinded at times, but some good action scenes, overall tho, I did enjoy the story. (