|
Shantaram: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Gregory David Roberts
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $7.48
You Save: $7.47 (50%)
New (40) Used (31) from $7.48
Rating:  277 reviews
Sales Rank: 715
Media: Paperback
Pages: 944
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.4 x 1.7
ISBN: 0312330537
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9780312330538
ASIN: 0312330537
Publication Date: October 1, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
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
Product Description
"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.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 272 more reviews...
 A Marvel October 22, 2004
Kat Bakhu (Albuquerque, NM United States)
183 out of 193 found this review helpful
Shantaram is one of those books that you wait to find for five years, even a decade. You know how it is. You read a really great book and, on coming to the end page, immediately want to find another book just as good to fill its place. So you go out looking for such a book, but cannot find it. You look for a week, then a month, then months turn to years, and finally,5 to 10 years later, you finally find a book that is a really great read.
Shantaram is such a book. It is an A+ story that captivates you on page one and sustains the pace through every one of its 920 pages. It overflows with a wide range of characters of every moral persuasion, good and bad. And it is rich with the big themes on the nature of humanity and the human struggle to survive and thrive, for better or worse. In addition, the actual writing is superb, descriptive and often beautiful, without ever descending into sentimental or maudlin. Roberts always manages to find the right phrase or word to bring into clear focus the incredible wide range of experiences he paints. I might add, this is one book that I do not want to see as a movie, because there is no way that a mere movie could be a fraction as good as this glorious, three dimensional work.
I'll be lucky if I have to wait only another 5 - 10 years to find another book this good.
A Book to Measure All Other Books By May 17, 2005
Marion (Louisiana)
84 out of 95 found this review helpful
What a book! What a story! The characters are as real as your hand in front of your face and you'll want to hop on the next airplane to Bombay (Mumbai), India to drop in at Leopold's to chance a glimpse of the old gang.....
This book will rip your heart out, stomp on it, and put it back in your chest all repaired by the ending. It took me a week to read and it was the best week of my life. I cried when it was over and haven't been able to read another book since. Truly an epic masterpiece.
 Everybody Loves The Author Far Too Much February 20, 2007
S. R. Bowen (Near San Francisco)
63 out of 75 found this review helpful
I'm more than half way through this book and I think I'm done reading it. Much of it has been very engaging and entertaining. But in the end I just don't believe the voice of the author any longer.
You see, everybody loves Lin. Simple villagers love him, slum dwellers love him, beautiful ex-prostitutes love him, gangsters love him, afghani drug lords love him, taxi drivers always love him at a glance and so on and so forth. The only people who don't love him are the few truly evil and brutal characters in the book and they hate him because it's only right that evil would hate such a paragon of love. After a certain point it's just silly. The narrator has no real flaws and moves with ease in every social circle under the Mumbai sun.
And the author always knows everything he needs to know and has every skill he needs to have. He starts the book as a rough and tough man of the streets. But it turns out he is a karate master. And it turns out he studied under great philosophers and it turns out that he gained his social sensitivity from his parents who are renowned socialists. If the plot required the flying of a 747 I'm sure we would learn how Lin spent summers at his uncles flying school and is an ace pilot.
In the end the protaganist seems like some kind of MacGyver of love and virtue and skill; he just pulls any needed talent or feeling off his toolbelt and he can do anything and win love from anyone.
But, for me, once the narrator's voice rings false the book is done. It doesn't matter how interesting the secondary characters are or how compelling the plotline. If I can't trust any of it then I don't want to read it.
 Orientalist grandiloquence October 12, 2005
Similosaurus (Somerville, MA USA)
33 out of 65 found this review helpful
Apart from the one-liners, which were sometimes brilliant, this was an extremely poorly written novel. The descriptions were cheesy, cliched, and unbelievably mango-breasty: "eyes the color of the desert before a rainstorm"... come on, that's terrible!
The stories about the slums, the prison, and the passport laundering were interesting, if you could get through the orientalist prose and suffer through his pathetically overwrought passages about Karla, her green eyes, her quick half-smile, and whatnot.
This book should have been a Bollywood movie. It had all the absurd constructs of Bollywood fantasies - the elusive love interest, guns and violence, a hard, lonely hero, the comic low-class Indian side-kick, and the evil gangsters and patriarchal wise men.
And if it had been a movie, at least it would have been over sooner.
The Best Novel of the 21st Century...so far September 6, 2007
Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA)
32 out of 34 found this review helpful
FINALLY, a gut-wrenching, harrowing, well-penned novel, whose author suffers not from the literary constipation of most current "highbrow" authors (He's faced down far more deadly things, chronicled herein, to be affrighted by sharp penned editors.) - A book, in short, that will make your heart bleed with the depths to which the human soul can sink and the glories to which it can rise. ----I read so many books, but this is the first true work of art and genius published in this new century that I've managed to discover. It is a book from which I'm still recovering from having read. Like all great art, it leaves one with a new perspective on the world and causes one to reconnoitre the heart's bearings. The book strips away the lies we tell ourselves and leaves the heartstrings bare for the reader to see, where he/ she will recognise his/her own.
Let's get something straight here: This is not a book of "purple prose" or any form of sentimentality. Each tear shed is wrung from harrowing experience. As Roberts writes, "One of the reasons we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you."--Your soul will have cried with Roberts's many times before the end of the book.
This is truly a book for lovers of great literature. Roberts writes, "I never found a club or a clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it."--This book is one that values the mystery of people and the mystery of human existence above all else. ----Including yours, reader.
|
|
|
|
| |
