Shantaram By Gregory David Roberts

I'm not really sure where to start with this review. The book is 933 pages long. I have many little book marks through-out in an attempt to remember "key parts". I guess I'll start by telling you what the book is about.

This book is about Lin, (the author himself), a man who escaped from a maximum security prison in Australia and ended up in Bombay, India. For ten years he lives in Bombay, learning the ways of the Indian people, their many languages, customs, and way of life. He lives in the "slums", running a free clinic to the slum dwellers, even though he has no formal training as a medical professional, he does the best he can. Along the way he falls in love with a woman who refuses to love anyone, finds the "father he never had" in the head of the Bombay Mafia, receives medicine off the black-market from a colony of Lepers, goes to work for the mafia, and even smuggles "goods" into Afghanistan in the middle of a war. This book is based off of true facts, with fiction surrounding it. 


Overall I thought this was a terrific book. I would recommend it to anyone who has enough patients to read through the entire thing. It flows very well and I felt that it moved along at a fast enough pace, until he is working his way into Afghanistan. This is where it started to lose me, and I became rather annoyed will all of the little details and really just wanted the book to end. A little closer to the end it did seem to pick up again, either that or I was just anxious to get it over with.


The book is full of what I'll call, "little pieces of wisdom". That is one of the things I loved about this book. I didn't tire of it as I've read others did. If you look up the reviews for this book on Goodreads, you'll find many people have included in their reviews, their favorite passages, or "nuggets". I felt there was a lot of meaning to most of what he was saying, and I like a book where I want to remember specific lines, like those you would find in an inspirational calendar or the book.


I thought the author had a great sense of humor, there were many times while reading this that I would laugh out loud and to the point of tears. Two of my favorite stories in this book were about his "bear hug" from a real bear (a gift from one of his gangster "brothers") and him falling off  his horse and riding it from underneath, hanging from the horses neck. I still laugh when I think about this. The characters were very well developed, I truly felt like I had met these people and spent many years with them. My favorite was Prabaker, the first Indian Lin meets, who takes him in and shows him all of the sites of India. These two have an incredible friendship and I love Prabaker's out look on life. 

One frustrating thing about this story is how Lin always becomes fast and easy friends with everyone. Each time a new person is introduced, it take him only 3 seconds to realize he "really likes him" or he "can really trust him". Even the 2 or 3 people who he doesn't instantly warm up to end up either apologizing to him for some thing they said, or becoming another one of his BFF's. That did get quit nauseating. It felt very forced and fake that he was always so nice and reserved.


I'm not sure exactly how much of this book is fact vs fiction, and for me this made it harder to judge the story as a whole. I'm not sure if some of the stuff I loved was based off of a good writer's imagination, or a real mans experiences. This book did have it's ups and downs for me, but ultimately I found the good parts outweighed the bad. I would read it again, despite how long it is.


This is a book I'd love to hear others comments on, if you've read it please let me know what you thought, or let me know where your review is so I can read it. Thanks!

 "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." Shantaram