Shantaram
By: Gregory David Roberts
This is an amazing tale that I would recommend to anyone as just a solid piece of literature. There are many endearing factors of this story, but the characters were the most engaging I think I have ever read about. The setting was detailed and rich, and the action was well paced with the unfolding of the story. Gregory David Roberts, an Australian author, ex heroin addict, convicted bank robber, and humanitarian (you read correctly) writes with an elegant style that is almost poetic at times but strait forward enough to keep readers on track. I just wanted to do a light review of the book and what it meant to me. Basically why I enjoyed this story.
The story is a novel but it is largely based on the life, trials, and tribulations of the author Mr. Gregory David Roberts. There is much debate over how much of the story is factual versus inflated with fictional aspects. This makes the story so much more endearing and lasting to me, because I know it is steeped with real details from his life.
He himself stated in an interview “Some experiences from my life are described pretty much as they happened, and others are created narratives, informed by my experience. I wanted to write two or three novels on some bare elements from my life, allowing me to explore the themes that interested me, while keeping the narrative immediate by anchoring it to some of my real experiences. They’re novels, not autobiographies, and all of the characters and dialogue is created. It doesn’t matter how much of it is true or not to me, it’s how true they are to all of us, and to our common humanity.”
The characters in this book are absolutely genuine and are expressed with definite sense of passion. Right from the start you are drawn in by the people he describes. Their looks, personalities, emotions, and actions captured with such brilliance that you feel drawn in from the very first couple pages of the book. There are so many characters that you fall in love with because of the things they say and the things they do. Just really well written the dialogue for me was easy enough to follow. Some of the names of the characters got a little confusing because there are so many but the important ones are described in detail many times so you start to remember and even begin to feel like you know them as you continue to read. There are little bits of the native languages peppered throughout the story and that adds to the immersion of the setting. The small bit of language and the accents he uses in his writing are top notch and really drive home that the people speak English only as a second language. The author describes nationalities and ethnicities of many different people and he describes their physical features with the same detail so after a while when he says a person’s name you can get a mental image of what they look like when they walk up to him.
The setting of the story is in Bombay. He describes the city in such a fashion that it seems dangerous but beautiful, diverse but traditional, and all in all like a magical, colorful place. He describes how culturally imbalanced the social strata is and he describes the slums in great details and even lives in one himself. He saw firsthand the class difference from neighborhood to neighborhood. Later on in the book he travels to other locations around Bombay. Being what it is I love to travel and have done quite a bit of globe-trotting, It all sounds so beautiful. This book and the wonderful descriptions of the setting and culture made It a point on my personal bucket list to travel there and experience the sights, sounds, and smells for myself.
The Book has a little bit for everyone: plenty of action, adventure, love, lust, crime, humor, life, and death. All these things blend beautifully together to create a hell of a story. The author Gregory David Roberts is a real person and pretty much is himself in the story. This makes the book all the better to me because I feel more connected to a story when I have experienced some of the feelings and emotions as their characters.
Let’s talk if you have read it!
Happy reading!