Shantaram by Gregory Roberts

Shantaram = man of peace

In this case the man of peace is an ex junky in jail for armed robbery who escapes from jail to meander around in the Mumbai underworld. Drug and weapons smuggling rings aside the main character is a MAN OF PEACE first and foremost.

I am 250 pages into this beast and thus far it has been a nice quick entertaining read. I am not one of these people who gets irate that the author took some poetic license to tell a better story ITS A NOVEL- ITS NOT REAL. In fact this same thing pissed me off about reviews I read about Papillon and people pissing on Henri Charrier. I dont know about the rest of you but I do not care if the author is a criminal or a liar when reading NOVELS. If I was reading a biography or a non fiction book I might start caring about those other facts. Listening to NPR I came across the book description and decided to pick it up from B&N. I'm glad I did thus far... we will see if I am still this positive 600 pages from now. Gregory David Roberts has dredged up alot of haters in the amazon review section for this book as well as a TON of lovers. I think it speaks well of the Shantaram that it has created a bit of heated discussion.



Here is one of the better Shantaram Skeptic reviews.
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Have you ever had an experience where a gregarious, but slightly dodgy stranger engages you in conversation and launches into a rambling series of tall tales about their life to which you respond by smiling and saying "Really? How interesting." in an attempt to be polite and non-judgmental - but as time goes on inconsistencies within the narrative become more and more glaringly apparent until with dawning horror you realize that you are in fact sitting next to a delusional psychopath who not only considers you a gullible fool, but possibly intends you mortal harm? Reading Shantaram I experienced just such an uncomfortable feeling of being taken for a ride by a career grifter.

I missed the hype surrounding the initial launch of the book so I don't know whether it is intended to be a real life story presented as actual fact, or a deliberately hyperbolic allegory built upon a skeleton of events from the author's life. Clearly a lot of the success of the book so far has depended on its being perceived as the former, and since the incidents in the story are outside my (and probably most readers') direct experience, or otherwise unverifiable (Mumbai underworld activities, mujehadeen guerilla warfare) I am quite willing to give the benefit of the doubt. However, small implausibilities in the more mundane sections of the novel chip away at the writer's credibility and gradually bring into increasing doubt the veracity of the whole. For example, overhearing a conversation in Urdu between Karla and Nazeer, Lin says that he understands only every third or fourth word - but conversational Urdu is practically the same as conversational Hindi in which he claims to be fully fluent. Later he says that he can perform twenty sets of thirty pushups with a minute of rest between sets - please try this at home - it's a pretty tall order for even an Olympic athlete, let alone someone drying out from a three month heroin binge. On another occasion he writes that nine men were able to survive for a month in the mountains of Afghanistan with no other food but the flesh of a single goat - how? These are just a few random examples, but the point is that if we can't trust the author's account of his language abilities, diet or workout routines, can we really trust the more sensational accounts of his apparently superhuman fighting prowess, ability to withstand torture and sexual success with a string of smoking hot babes? Of course it could be that Roberts' intention is to present events in the hyperbolic, super-real style of 80s Bollywood in which Indian everymen are able to overcome insuperable odds and take on armies of evil gangsters with their bare hands - in which case the novel succeeds brilliantly as a sort of psychadelic, smellovision fable for our times. But if he is presenting the events of the novel as autobiographical fact with a completely straight face then one can't help suspecting that we are reading the delusional ramblings of a self-aggrandizing windbag. Structurally the book suggests comparisons with Sade's longer works - sprawling lists of sensational incident separated by babbling philosophical treatises - but spiritually the character Lin has most in common with is Tomb Raider's Lara Croft. If, as I suspect, the book is in fact no more than a colorful fabrication purporting to be true I can't really understand why James Frey was hung out to dry whilst Roberts remains the toast of the town.