Catch Hold Of Shantaram Conceived By Gregory David Roberts Provided As Digital Version

have spent the last two weeks in Roberts's seductive, chaotic, slum filled, audacious Bombay, full of vibrant, wonderful, charismatic characters.
This is a grand, sprawling, intelligent, autobiographical novel, elegantly written and splendidly evocative of an India I would otherwise never know.

As I sit here trying to decide how to best sum up just what this novel is about I realize that it is about everthing.
All of life's many lessons are here in this huge, sweeping, monumental story but mostly it is about love and forgiveness and one man's searing search for redemption.

Above all, perhaps, as Pat Conroy says "it is a grand work of extraordinary art, a thing of exceptional beauty".

Do not let the size deter you, I was hooked from the very first sentence and stayed that way through to the final word.
Simply one of the most thrilling and touching novels I have ever read, I feel like a bit of an asshole for giving this three,

Most of my goodreads friends have given this five, 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, coworkers 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.
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, all the way note to someone else, there should be a goodreadsesque 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.


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 warpspeed

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 thepages 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 miniadventure 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 hisplus 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.
The way Roberts describes Indians in this book is like a series of bad caricatures I cringed terribly.
There is the overfriendly and smiling, trusting, barbaric, not very clever, poor Prabaker I HATED the way he wrote Prabaker's English.
It made him sound like a racist Disney character or like the golum from LOTR to the cool and smooth Iranian gangster if you like ridiculous Bollywood movies, this is the book for you! In typical fashion, the white guy is the hero of nearly every scene, a la Patrick Swayze in City of Joy, as if

people who lived in slums sit around waiting for a white hero to come and save them.


BUT there were things I liked about the book aside from the sweet friend who lent it to me.
It is cushioned in so much love for India and its people, And while that love is sometimes really dramatic and poorly written like when he ends each chapter with an epiphany or worse, the love scenes you get the sense as the book moves on that he becomes more of an insider telling the story from inside and not from outside, which is incredibly admirable.
How many white people do I know that would move to the slums of Bombay, learn Marathi, visit a village, fight street dogs, etc.
etc. For those moments alone, I was glad to be reading it,




FINALLY! Gregory David Roberts says it took himlong and troubled years to write this book.
I felt it took me that long to READ it! Because it was recommended to me, I strove to read it in its entirety.


Why I found this to be a troublesome read:
, Lin main character based on the author, Although I enjoy reading about flawed protagonists and Lin definitely was, he comes across as an arrogant, hypocritical modernday Robin Hood.
GDR legitimizes child slavery, scoring drugs for tourists, giving "dirty" money to slum dwellers, counterfeiting passports, licenses, etc.
while being involved with organized crime all this didn't win any Brownie points from me, and often left me angry.
Truly, an unsympathetic character from start to finish,
. This book was too longwinded! What was the editor thinking She should have taken some HUGE pruning shears and cut out at leastpages, starting with the endless use of inane similes and metaphors about everything, as well as his eyerolling philosophical musings! GDR writes about facial and bodily features and clothing worn by EVERYONE he meets! And how many times does he have to describe Karla's eyes, hair, lips, clothing, etc.
I get it! She's dropdead gorgeous with green eyes, black hair, luscious lips and likes wearing green clothes! Too bad she's a onedimensional character.
The constant use of description would be something my Gradestudents would attempt in their story writing,

Some redeeming qualities:
, Slum dwellers, Johnny Cigar and Joseph, slum manager, Qasim Ali Hussein, Lin's hilarious friend, Prabaker, the Standing Babas even Kano the Bear, were all entertaining characters, and I would have been fascinated to learn more of their stories.

. Lin's time spent in an Indian prison was the most hairraising, engrossing part of the story for me!

Unfortunately, the cons outweigh the pros for me in regards to quality story writing.
GDR tries to describe India, its culture and its people, but if you want to read a truly captivating story about this topic, I highly recommend sitelinkA Fine Balance by sitelinkRohinton Mistry.
I realised that I'd already 'reviewed' this work by way of a reply I'd made to a recommendation by Andy S.
So I've simply copy/pasted that same reply here: I can understand the 'Marmite' loveitorhateit axiom the book has literary mood swings.


I read Shantaram a while back, A sprawling novel favoured by backpackers the world over, It polarises opinion readers either love or hate it, It's overly selfrighteous and puts you in mind of Walter Mitty, but the author has certainly suffered for his art, creating a novel that is difficult to ignore.
I loved, loved the first part of this book, The author's description of arriving in Mumbai is so similar to my experience the sites and smells, staying in Colaba, the restaurants visited it really brought back my trip to a city I loved.


However, I've had to put this one down for a bit of a break, I just have the feeling Gregory David Roberts is pretty far up his own ass and I'm not sure I'm buying what he's selling.


What's making it hard to just sit back and enjoy this book is Robert's description of specific experiences usually ones outside the usual North American experience staying in a remote village, the Standing Babas, living in a slum, etc.
seem a bit far fetched to me, He goes to the village and Ack! Flood! While seeing the Babas Eeek! Knife attack! And his first day in the slum Fire! Fire! Fire!

To be sure, there are a lot of stories and cultural experiences to be had in another country, particularly in one like India.
I'm just not sure if I buy that Roberts personally experienced all of them,

When I was in Agra, seeing the Taj Mahal, we were told that the towers surrounding the Taj used to be open to the public, but that they became a popular spot for love sick suicides, and are now closed.
I have a feeling that if Roberts heard this story, he would have been standing at the foot of the tower when a lovelorn jumper took his last leap and would have an even barfier description for it than "a lovelorn jumper took his last leap".
. .

I don't know why I'm having trouble with this book because the stories are interesting, Maybe if I didn't feel like Roberts was trying to convince me that this is TOTALLY COMPLETELY TRUE YOU GUYS as opposed to a more fictionalized memoir, maybe I could, but for now it's back on the shelf.


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