"Me tomó mucho tiempo y a la mayor parte del mundo aprender lo que sé sobre el amor y el destino y las decisiones que tomamos, pero el corazón de esto me llegó en un instante, mientras estaba encadenado a una pared y siendo torturado". Así comienza esta épica e hipnotizante primera novela de Gregory David Roberts, ambientada en el inframundo de la bombay contemporánea. Shantaram es narrado por Lin, un convicto fugado con un pasaporte falso que huye de la prisión de máxima seguridad en Australia por las calles llenas de una ciudad donde puede desaparecer. Acompañados por su guía y fiel amigo, Prabaker,los dos entran en la sociedad oculta de mendigas y gángsters de Bombay, prostitutas y hombres santos, soldados y actores, e indios y exiliados de otros países, que buscan en este lugar notable lo que no pueden encontrar en otros lugares. Como un hombre cazado sin hogar, familia o identidad, Lin busca amor y significado mientras dirige una clínica en uno de los barrios pobres de la ciudad, y sirve a su aprendizaje en las artes oscuras de la mafia de Bombay. La búsqueda lo lleva a la guerra, la tortura en prisión, el asesinato y una serie de traiciones enigmáticas y sangrientas. Las claves para desentrañar los misterios e intrigas que unen a Lin están en manos de dos personas. El primero es Khader Khan: padrino de la mafia, criminal-filósofo-santo, y mentor de Lin en el inframundo de la Ciudad Dorada. La segunda es Karla: escurridiza, peligrosa y hermosa, cuyas pasiones son impulsadas por secretos que la atormentan y sin embargo le dan un poder terrible. Barrios marginales ardientes y hoteles de cinco estrellas, amor romántico y agonías carceleras, guerras criminales y películas de Bollywood, gurús espirituales y guerrilleros muyahidines- esta gran novela tiene el mundo de la experiencia humana a su alcance, y un amor apasionado por la India en el corazón. Basado en la vida del autor, es en cualquier medida el debut de una voz extraordinaria en la literatura.… (más)
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.
The man who calls himself Lindsay "Lin" Ford (this is an alias, but we never get his real name) in Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram has had a real switch-up in life. At one point, he was a typical suburban husband and father in Australia. Then he got into heroin, and then bank robbery, and then there was divorce and custody loss and prison. Facing a decades-long sentence in a high-security prison, he manages to escape and goes on the run, landing almost by chance in Mumbai with his forged passport, and a chance decision to trust a street guide with a big smile changes his life all over again.
Lin's adventures in India are truly epic, from six months in his street-guide-turned-friend Prabakar's rural village, to living and working as a medic in one of the city's enormous slums, to Lin's passionate love for Karla, a beautiful and mysterious Swiss expat, back to prison (in India this time), then into organized crime and even to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen. Along the way there's a shadowy, malevolent madam, a traintop marriage proposal, and Bollywood movies, among other things. It's sprawling, with countless side characters who appear and re-appear throughout. Lin's ability to proceed with cautious optimism keeps him generally lucky in both friendship and opportunity, but even that can't keep him safe from tragedy.
The book is based heavily on Roberts' own experiences...like his protagonist, he was an Australian addict-turned-robber who escaped from prison and lived for several years in India. While some characters are, in fact, entirely created, several (including Prabakar and his family) are actual people who Roberts did know in India but whose stories he may have rendered somewhat less than faithfully. It walks a fine line between obvious invention/fantasy (the scene in which Lin and Karla finally sleep together has them running into each other's arms while a thunderstorm rages around them and I literally laughed at how ridiculous it was though it was not at all meant to be funny) and things it seems like we're meant to believe even though they are clearly ludicrous (like the idea that Lin has apparently has an extraordinary ability to know instantly if someone is a decent person and is almost immediately accepted and tightly bonded into every community he finds himself in).
If you're looking for a plot-driven adventure story and have a high tolerance for flowery language, this will likely be something you really enjoy! It can honestly be hard to focus on how silly some of the events in the book are because he generally keeps things moving quickly enough that you don't linger on them before Roberts takes you in a new direction. I'm not kidding about the prose style, though...I'm generally fairly tolerant and sometimes even enjoy work that tends towards the overwritten, but only about 100 pages into the nearly 950 of this book I was already rolling my eyes and it didn't get better from there. There's a very good 500-600 page book in here, but it would have taken some serious editing down of the often-trite philosophical patter Roberts constantly inserts, and honestly more development of Lin as a character. He's our protagonist and we spend all our time with him, but we actually know vanishingly little of his life before he was imprisoned in his home country. We get full backstories for several less important characters, which made it extra frustrating for Lin to be so unrooted. As I think is probably obvious by now, I didn't especially like this book, finding it only mediocre-to-average in quality and completely unworthy of its enormous length. But honestly I think if I had read it in my early-to-mid-20s, when my tolerance for "poignant" pronouncements about life was higher, I'd have liked it more. As is, though, I can't recommend it. ( )
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. ( )
A very distinctive read. This is described as a novel, though it appears to be highly autobiographical - which frankly is extraordinary. Essentially it's the story of an escaped convict who flees from Australia and winds up in Bombay (and is quickly dubbed Lin). Falling in love with the city, he accumulates a wide and diverse set of friends. This actually feels like two books smooshed together - one is a heartwarming comedy of Lin's friendship with some of Bombay's lowest classes, and his time living and working in a Bombay slum; the second is of Lin's increasing involvement with the Bombay mafia (with considerable moral ambiguity). Both are fine and interesting (and, perhaps surprisingly, pretty convincing) but they sit together a little uneasily.
On the downside, the writing sometimes draws attention to itself a bit - an obscure word may be rolled out when a more common word would do. It's almost as if the writer wishes to demonstrate his erudition (possibly to counter preconceptions due to his criminal activities). And the passages devoted to matters of the heart are best got through quickly.
In addition, the book ends a little arbitrarily. There are many loose ends, and several events which would have delieverd more closure. Still, at more than 900 pages it's not as if you feel short changed.
One of the best things about the book is the author's delight in and devotion to India. He really explores a much wider spectrum of India society than most people ever would (foreign or, I venture, Indian). His enthusiasm is evident and infectious (and, I have no doubt, sincere).
So a really fascinating novel. It's a little ungainly in some ways, and ends up provoking a confusion of emotions. But in all that lends an air of it being a story that the author had to tell, which, in the end, is pretty endearing. ( )
"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.
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.
"Me tomó mucho tiempo y a la mayor parte del mundo aprender lo que sé sobre el amor y el destino y las decisiones que tomamos, pero el corazón de esto me llegó en un instante, mientras estaba encadenado a una pared y siendo torturado". Así comienza esta épica e hipnotizante primera novela de Gregory David Roberts, ambientada en el inframundo de la bombay contemporánea. Shantaram es narrado por Lin, un convicto fugado con un pasaporte falso que huye de la prisión de máxima seguridad en Australia por las calles llenas de una ciudad donde puede desaparecer. Acompañados por su guía y fiel amigo, Prabaker,los dos entran en la sociedad oculta de mendigas y gángsters de Bombay, prostitutas y hombres santos, soldados y actores, e indios y exiliados de otros países, que buscan en este lugar notable lo que no pueden encontrar en otros lugares. Como un hombre cazado sin hogar, familia o identidad, Lin busca amor y significado mientras dirige una clínica en uno de los barrios pobres de la ciudad, y sirve a su aprendizaje en las artes oscuras de la mafia de Bombay. La búsqueda lo lleva a la guerra, la tortura en prisión, el asesinato y una serie de traiciones enigmáticas y sangrientas. Las claves para desentrañar los misterios e intrigas que unen a Lin están en manos de dos personas. El primero es Khader Khan: padrino de la mafia, criminal-filósofo-santo, y mentor de Lin en el inframundo de la Ciudad Dorada. La segunda es Karla: escurridiza, peligrosa y hermosa, cuyas pasiones son impulsadas por secretos que la atormentan y sin embargo le dan un poder terrible. Barrios marginales ardientes y hoteles de cinco estrellas, amor romántico y agonías carceleras, guerras criminales y películas de Bollywood, gurús espirituales y guerrilleros muyahidines- esta gran novela tiene el mundo de la experiencia humana a su alcance, y un amor apasionado por la India en el corazón. Basado en la vida del autor, es en cualquier medida el debut de una voz extraordinaria en la literatura.
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Long book about India
9
Lin's adventures in India are truly epic, from six months in his street-guide-turned-friend Prabakar's rural village, to living and working as a medic in one of the city's enormous slums, to Lin's passionate love for Karla, a beautiful and mysterious Swiss expat, back to prison (in India this time), then into organized crime and even to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen. Along the way there's a shadowy, malevolent madam, a traintop marriage proposal, and Bollywood movies, among other things. It's sprawling, with countless side characters who appear and re-appear throughout. Lin's ability to proceed with cautious optimism keeps him generally lucky in both friendship and opportunity, but even that can't keep him safe from tragedy.
The book is based heavily on Roberts' own experiences...like his protagonist, he was an Australian addict-turned-robber who escaped from prison and lived for several years in India. While some characters are, in fact, entirely created, several (including Prabakar and his family) are actual people who Roberts did know in India but whose stories he may have rendered somewhat less than faithfully. It walks a fine line between obvious invention/fantasy (the scene in which Lin and Karla finally sleep together has them running into each other's arms while a thunderstorm rages around them and I literally laughed at how ridiculous it was though it was not at all meant to be funny) and things it seems like we're meant to believe even though they are clearly ludicrous (like the idea that Lin has apparently has an extraordinary ability to know instantly if someone is a decent person and is almost immediately accepted and tightly bonded into every community he finds himself in).
If you're looking for a plot-driven adventure story and have a high tolerance for flowery language, this will likely be something you really enjoy! It can honestly be hard to focus on how silly some of the events in the book are because he generally keeps things moving quickly enough that you don't linger on them before Roberts takes you in a new direction. I'm not kidding about the prose style, though...I'm generally fairly tolerant and sometimes even enjoy work that tends towards the overwritten, but only about 100 pages into the nearly 950 of this book I was already rolling my eyes and it didn't get better from there. There's a very good 500-600 page book in here, but it would have taken some serious editing down of the often-trite philosophical patter Roberts constantly inserts, and honestly more development of Lin as a character. He's our protagonist and we spend all our time with him, but we actually know vanishingly little of his life before he was imprisoned in his home country. We get full backstories for several less important characters, which made it extra frustrating for Lin to be so unrooted. As I think is probably obvious by now, I didn't especially like this book, finding it only mediocre-to-average in quality and completely unworthy of its enormous length. But honestly I think if I had read it in my early-to-mid-20s, when my tolerance for "poignant" pronouncements about life was higher, I'd have liked it more. As is, though, I can't recommend it. (